Historic London Town & Gardens Wedding | Cailean + Ali

Beautiful Spring Wedding at the Historic London Town and Gardens Wedding Venue in Annapolis, MD

Historic Londontown & Gardens wedding of a couple dipping each other after the end of a ceremony

About the Historic London Town & Gardens venue

Having photograhped at the Historic London Town & Gardens venue before, I couldn’t have been more excited to return there for Ali and Cailean’s wedding day. It features a beautiful view of the waterfront as you pass through the floral bushes of flowers and greenery from the gardens, making for a very romantic location to hold your special day.

Although small, there is a lounge area for the bridal getting ready space, which I recommend for putting on the finishing touches of getting into your dress and attire after doing a majority of your getting ready moments at a nearby airbnb or hotel. The main lawn features a large area of space to hold all your guests during the ceremony with a view of the gardens to the left and the waterfront as the backdrop. A wonderful thing about this venue is that they do offer a nice Plan B for the ceremony in case of rain, so extra thumbs-up!

Afterwards, I love taking my couples farther into the gardens and venturing to the pier for a variety of gorgeous scenery for their private portraits. The venue is large enough to where every couple getting married can have unique photos of their own based on the creative eye of their photographer!

Ali & Cailean’s wedding day

April Showers Bring May Flowers…

To say, Ali and Cailean’s wedding was full of twists and turns in emotions and expectations would be an understatement. From the very beginning, the couple had wanted to have a spring wedding, hence why they decided on an April wedding and within the gorgeous gardens of the venue. However, the saying “April showers bring May flowers” couldn’t be more true. The entire week leading up to their wedding day came a very insistent flurry of constant rain and gloomy clouds, with the same forecast all the way up to the point of their wedding day. The chances of rain were up to 90% for the entierty of the wedding day, which pretty much meant that it was 100% going to rain.

I like to think of myself as every wedding couple’s anxiety sponge, just soaking up whatever stresses there are and batting out fires wherever I can. So the night before the wedding day, I had texted the couple telling them that because we can’t control the weather, the next best thing to do is to embrace it. I showed them lots of different inspiration photos, featuring heavy downpour on other people’s wedding days and how those portraits still came out beautiful. I even told that, in fact, I was actually even more excited for their wedding day because of the rain, since it meant that they’re going to have such a unique photos. Plus, there’s always that age-old superstition where rain on your wedding day brings good luck to your marriage and is an indicator that your marriage is going to last. I actually had to look up where that superstition had come from, and apparently it’s because when a knot becomes wet, it is extremely hard to untie – therefore, “tying the knot” on your rainy wedding day means that your marriage, just like the wet knot, will also be difficult to unravel.

The day of

Once the big day arrived, I found myself super happy and relieved to witness Ali being very hopeful and positive about the day ahead. In general, I think I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of brides who take on the whole “whatever happens, happens” mindset, and this has also applied to Ali. When it came time for the ceremony, all the vendors had started preparing for Plan B, where all the chairs and altar decor were being set up in the ballroom space. However, 15 minutes prior to the ceremony, we all made a call that it was actually possible to have their ceremony outdoors – and the couple couldn’t have been happier! Their plan to have the lush garden of this venue featured during their ceremony was able to come true. Even though it definitely drizzled and showered before the ceremony just as the forecast had predicted, it felt as if all the rain had cleared away just for them, when the big moments mattered.

During the ceremony which, of course, comprised of lots of tears and laughter and “I can’t believe we’re outside!”, Ali and Cailean had decided to incorporate some Romanian traditions, which comprised of drinking wine and sharing three bites of bread with each other, signifying the fruitful life they’re about to embark together. Then to wrap up the end of the ceremony, the couple jumped the broom, and were then greeted with the tossing of flower petals by all the guests cheering for them back down the aisle. It honestly couldn’t have been more perfect.