There is no venue in this story.

Aaron and Connor got married on a Saturday in August, in a back garden in Rathfarnham, with the guts of a hundred hired chairs on the grass and a garden room standing in for an altar. No venue, no marquee, no viewing appointments. They put the whole thing in a garden that one of their families has been cutting for years, and then walked everybody down the road to the local pub for the dinner.

I have photographed a lot of weddings in hotels that cost more and felt smaller.

Bridesmaid having her hair curled in a sitting room at home with pink balloons at the patio door, on the morning of a Rathfarnham garden wedding
Just after ten, and the chair is a kitchen chair

Two Houses, One Morning

The morning ran in two places at once, which is the single logistical thing about this kind of wedding that costs you time.

Connor was in one house with six in blush pink and a flower girl. Aaron was in another with the lilac side. Both houses had the same shape to the morning: a hairdresser working at the brightest window in the room, a kettle going, somebody’s granny in the door early, and the good glasses out at eleven in the morning.

Wedding rings in a whitewashed wooden box reading And The Two Become One, surrounded by gypsophila

Groom in an ivory dinner jacket and black shirt in a doorway at home while two older women pin corsages
The corsage committee, fully operational

Groom in a navy three piece suit laughing as an older woman pins his buttonhole in a conservatory

Two houses is worth planning for rather than discovering. If both of you are getting ready separately and the houses are ten minutes apart, one photographer has to choose, and the choice is usually the wrong one for somebody. It is the clearest argument I know for a second photographer, and it applies whether you are two grooms, two brides, or a couple who simply do not want to spend the morning apart from their own families.

Groom in an ivory jacket toasting with six bridesmaids in blush pink and a flower girl in a back garden, Dublin mountains behind
The Dublin mountains over the back fence, which is a Rathfarnham privilege

The Garden

By one o’clock the garden had stopped being a garden.

Wedding guests arriving and taking their seats on red and blue banqueting chairs in a suburban back garden
Twenty past one, and the chairs are filling from the back, as chairs always do

Here is what was actually in it, because this is the part people want the detail on. Rows of hired banqueting chairs on the grass, red ones and blue ones mixed, with a clear aisle down the middle. A stretch of decking at the top with potted bay trees along it and wooden troughs of white bedding plants. A pale grey timber garden room at the head of the aisle with white French doors, hanging baskets of purple petunias either side, and a rusted tree of life plaque on the gable. A rustic willow arch at the far end where the path comes round the house. A dressed table with a garland of pink and cream roses, tall glass cylinders, and a PA speaker up on a stand at the back.

That is the whole build. Nothing in that list is exotic and most of it was hired.

Bridesmaids in lilac walking down the aisle between seated guests at a back garden wedding ceremony
Twenty to two

The Ceremony

The order of service was a single folded sheet: expression of intent, a reading, the witnesses called forward, the blessing of the hands, then the vows and the rings.

Two grooms sitting together in the front row holding hands during their garden wedding ceremony
Sitting in the front row like guests at their own wedding, which I would recommend to anybody

They sat down for the readings, in the front row, among everybody else. It is a small thing and it changed the whole feel of the ceremony. Nobody was on display at the top for forty minutes. When the readings finished they stood up and walked four steps.

Wedding guest reading at a microphone beside a grey garden room, hanging basket of purple petunias overhead
The mic on a stand, which is the most important thing hired that day

Groom in a navy suit reading handwritten vows to his husband in an ivory jacket at a garden ceremony
Connor, I love you. You are my best friend.

Their vows were written out and printed and read off the page, which is the right way to do it. The sheet is in shot above, and the first line of Aaron’s is the one that set the whole garden off.

Two grooms holding hands and smiling during their wedding ceremony in a Dublin back garden

Two grooms lighting a unity candle printed with their names on a flower dressed table
Two named tapers and one candle, in a garden, in a breeze. It took a couple of goes.

Wide photograph of a back garden wedding ceremony with the celebrant, the grooms and around a hundred seated guests
The whole thing, from the back row. A greenhouse in the next garden over.

Look at that photograph for a second, because it is the argument for the entire idea. Close to a hundred people, a clean backdrop, hedge and trees on three sides, and a house behind me with a kitchen full of ice. It is a wedding venue. It is also somebody’s back garden with a greenhouse next door.

Two grooms kissing on the garden path after their wedding ceremony in Rathfarnham
Twenty-five past two

Confetti at the Front Door

Then everybody walked round the side of the house, and the front garden did a job that no hotel steps have ever done as well.

Black and white photograph of a groom dipping his husband as guests throw confetti outside the front door of a house
The front garden, the front door, and about four seconds of complete chaos

Confetti lines are usually a formality. This one was not, and the reason is simple: the guests were standing on grass they could actually spread out on, on both sides, with the house behind for a backdrop instead of a car park. If you are marrying at home, walk your confetti line before the day and pick the side of the house with the most room.

Groom in an ivory jacket lying across a garden bench in heart shaped sunglasses with his wedding party in pink around him
Group photographs, handled at exactly the level of seriousness they deserve

Group photographs took about fifteen minutes in the same garden, which is the other quiet advantage of doing it at home. Nobody had to be rounded up, because there was nowhere for anybody to go.

Twenty Minutes in Marlay Park

The one thing a back garden cannot give you is a change of scene, and you want one. We drove five minutes to Marlay Park.

Two grooms kissing on the steps of Marlay House under the columned portico with Virginia creeper turning red
The portico at Marlay House, with the creeper going over

Two grooms holding hands on a gravel path in front of the ivy covered stone cottages of Marlay Park courtyard

Two grooms framed inside a brick arch in Marlay Park, parkland behind them
The arch by the walled garden, which does the framing for you

Three settings, one car park, about half an hour including the walking. Marlay is a public park on a Saturday afternoon in August, so there were people walking the paths around us the whole time, and it did not matter in the slightest. If you are getting married at home in south Dublin, this is the spot. It is free, it is open, and it gives you columns, stone, gravel and parkland inside a few hundred metres.

Taylor’s Three Rock

The dinner was in Taylor’s Three Rock, which is five minutes back down the Grange Road and about as Rathfarnham as a building can be.

Two grooms kissing with their arms outstretched outside the thatched front of Taylor’s Three Rock pub in Rathfarnham
Thatch, red windows, and a signpost to the Farmhouse Bar

Two grooms cutting a three tier wedding cake in a function room with damask panelling

Wedding cake with an ivory quilted tier, a blush tier and a lilac striped tier, with two rubber duck grooms in top hats as cake toppers
Two rubber ducks in top hats and tails. Correct.

Best man giving a speech into a microphone in front of a fairy light backdrop while the two grooms laugh at the top table

The function room upstairs has damask panels, a stained glass dome in the ceiling, a fairy light curtain behind the top table and a wooden dance floor at the far end. Cake at six, speeches straight after, and the room was fully theirs for the night.

Marrying at home and eating in your local is one of the better value combinations in Dublin, and it is worth saying plainly: the day did not feel like a compromise at any point. It felt like a wedding where every location was chosen because somebody actually wanted to be there.

The Night

Two grooms during their first dance on a wooden dance floor under pink and purple lighting, guests watching in a ring around them
Just after eight

Packed wedding dance floor under coloured lights in the function room at Taylor’s Three Rock
Every generation on the floor at once, which is the only review a wedding needs

Planning a Back Garden Wedding in Ireland

That is the day. Here is the practical side, for anyone reading this because they are seriously considering doing it at home.

Ask the Solemniser First

This is the one that decides everything else, and most couples find it out in the wrong order.

If you want the legal ceremony in a private garden, a HSE civil registrar cannot do it. The published rules for civil marriage venues require a registry office or an approved venue open to the public. A religious or secular ceremony has different venue rules, but it is only legally binding when conducted by someone on the official Register of Solemnisers. Confirm the house and date with that person before booking anything else.

So the sequence is: find the solemniser, confirm they will marry you at the house, then book the date, then think about chairs. Doing it the other way round is how people end up having a registry office ceremony on a Thursday and calling the garden day a blessing.

Hire More Chairs Than You Think, and Get a PA

Chairs are the cheap part and they are the part that makes a garden look like a ceremony. These were standard banqueting chairs, red and blue, visibly hired, visibly mismatched, and not a bother on anybody.

The PA is the part people skip. An outdoor ceremony has nothing to bounce sound off. Without a microphone on a stand, the readings and the vows carry to the front three rows and stop, and everybody at the back spends forty minutes politely watching a mime. Hire the speaker.

Where to Put the Top of the Aisle

A two o’clock ceremony in August with a clear sky gives you the sun almost directly overhead. That is the hardest light of the year for faces, and it is the one real photographic problem a garden wedding has to solve.

Solve it with the building rather than with the camera. The garden room here did the work: it sat at the head of the aisle, it threw open shade over the celebrant and the table, and it gave a clean pale backdrop instead of a hedge full of hot spots. Whatever you have, a garden room, a shed with a decent gable, a house wall, a wide tree, put the ceremony against it and have the guests face it with the sun behind them.

The House Is the Venue, and That Is the Whole Point

Every problem a marquee is hired to solve, a house already solves. Toilets, a kitchen, the fridge, somewhere for a small child to fall asleep at eight o’clock, and a roof if it rains. This day never needed the roof, but the plan was there and it cost nothing. You will be told a hundred times that it will be grand. Have the plan anyway.

Do walk through the wet version out loud with somebody a few weeks beforehand. Where a hundred people stand, who carries the chairs in, what the ceremony looks like in the sitting room. Say it out loud once and then stop worrying about it.

Give Yourself One Location Away From the House

Twenty to thirty minutes somewhere else, with just the two of you, is the difference between a set of photographs from a garden and a set of photographs from a wedding.

It does not need to be far. Marlay Park was five minutes each way and gave three completely different backdrops. If you are elsewhere in Dublin, the same logic applies: a park, a stretch of coast, a set of good steps. Pick it in advance, drive it once, and put it in the timeline at a fixed time so it does not get eaten by the drinks reception.

The Frame Worth Doing It For

It is the wide one from the back row. Close to a hundred people on hired chairs, two people getting married in front of a garden room, hedges on three sides and somebody’s greenhouse in shot.

Nobody who looks at that photograph in thirty years will think it was a compromise. They will think, that was their garden.

Thinking About a Garden Wedding?

If you have a garden, or your parents do, and you have been quietly wondering whether it is actually possible, it is. Start with the solemniser question, get the chairs and the speaker sorted, and put a park within five minutes of the house in the timeline.

There is more on the county, and on the other venues and locations worth knowing about, in the Dublin wedding photography guide. If you are weighing up a smaller day generally, the micro wedding photography guide covers the same ground from another angle.

Have a look at wedding photography packages or get in touch and tell me about your day.