Disco Balls, Veggie Florals, and 14 Years of Chili Oil — Hailey + Logan’s Red Butte Garden Wedding

6/20/26

Disco Balls, Veggie Florals, and 14 Years of Chili Oil — Hailey + Logan’s Garden Wedding

Salt Lake City wedding photographer for funky, alt-creative couples | Spring wedding at Red Butte Garden

Let’s get one thing straight: Hailey and Logan are not “soft neutrals and a eucalyptus garland” people. They’re disco-ball-in-a-fragrance-garden people. They’re “let’s put beets in the centerpieces and see what happens” people. They met their first year of college — eighteen, oblivious, two strangers in a lecture hall who had no idea they’d just met the person they’d spend the next fourteen years building a life with — and somewhere along the way they turned into the kind of couple who plans vacations around chili oil and has more stamps in their passports than most people have houseplants.

Disco ball reception decor Red Butte Garden wedding Salt Lake

So when it came time to plan a wedding, “traditional” was never really on the table. It had to taste like their relationship and look like their life together, which — if you’ve been following along — also meant it had to have a little edge. We’d actually gotten a preview of that spirit months earlier, at their Hong Kong-inspired engagement session at Chinatown Supermarket — bold, editorial, completely unwilling to play it safe. The wedding picked up right where that session left off, just grown into something lusher and a little more disco. Enter Red Butte Garden — and a day that managed to be both a celebration and, quietly, a scrapbook of everywhere they’d been and everywhere they were headed.

A First Look Worth Slowing Down For

Bridal getting ready at Red Butte Garden Orangerie Salt Lake City wedding

Their first look happened along one of the Garden’s staircases, and it remains one of my favorite kinds of moments to photograph: warm, unhurried, openly emotional. There’s something about a staircase setting — the way it naturally creates depth, the way it lets you watch someone’s reaction build in real time as their person comes into view — that turns a first look into a small piece of visual storytelling on its own. Hailey and Logan’s was exactly that. No performance, no posing for the sake of it — just two people who’d been counting down to that exact moment.

That same instinct carried into the rest of their portraits. Hailey and Logan have an eye for art and a comfort in front of the camera that opened the door to more creative, intentional images throughout the day — the kind of shots that move past “we stood here and smiled” into something with real visual interest. It’s one of the most rewarding things about working with couples who already think in images: it gives a photographer room to actually create, not just document.

The Fragrance Garden Ceremony

Red Butte Garden’s Fragrance Garden is one of those rare ceremony spaces that does the heavy lifting for you. Tucked into the rise of the foothills with the Salt Lake Valley unfolding below, it gave Hailey and Logan’s ceremony a backdrop that felt both intimate and expansive — close enough to feel like a private garden moment, open enough to feel like the whole city was there to witness it. Spring in this particular corner of Red Butte is generous: new growth everywhere, soft light filtering through, the kind of lush, layered green that does most of the visual work before a single flower is even in frame.

It’s also, candidly, one of the best-kept secrets for couples wanting an editorial-feeling ceremony in Salt Lake without leaving the city. You get the overlook, the garden density, and a backdrop that photographs like a destination wedding — without anyone getting on a plane.

Cocktail Hour and Dinner in the Orangerie

From the Fragrance Garden, the celebration moved into the Orangerie for cocktail hour and dinner — a shift in atmosphere that suited the day perfectly. The room does a lot of the work on its own: floor-to-ceiling glass on one side, a two-story living wall of ivy and greenery rising up the other, so even the most candid, in-between moments — a toast caught mid-laugh, a kiss snuck in front of a packed table — end up framed by this dense, almost jungle-like backdrop. It’s the kind of space that makes a wedding feel lush and editorial without anyone trying very hard.

And then there was the twist: against all that deep, organic green, Hailey and Logan layered in an iridescent, disco-leaning energy — disco balls catching the light alongside the fresh vegetables and produce-forward florals. It’s an unexpected pairing on paper, lush garden greenery and a little bit of glitter and shine, but it’s exactly the kind of contrast that made their wedding feel like them: rooted and well-traveled, but never precious about it. The global food stations came alive in this room, the cabbage-and-beet florals got their proper close-up, and fourteen years of shared adventures finally got to sit down together at one long table, disco ball light catching the glassware the whole time.

A Wedding Built Around the Way They Actually Live

Most couples pick a color palette. Hailey and Logan picked a worldview. Working with Cuisine Unlimited Catering, they built their reception around global food stations — a literal trip around the world for guests, course by course, echoing the fourteen years the couple had spent doing exactly that together. Complete with create your own Pho bar, taco station, Indian and sushi. It’s the kind of detail that sounds simple on paper and reads as deeply personal in person: this wasn’t catering chosen for the menu, it was catering chosen because it was the love story.

The florals followed the same instinct, and this is where their wedding broke from the expected — made all the more impressive by the fact that Hailey and her friends designed and arranged every bit of it themselves. Instead of leaning purely into blooms, they wove in color cabbages, beets, and asparagus alongside lush greenery and fruit — a produce-forward, slightly unexpected palette that read as fresh, whimsical, and a little bit rebellious in the best way. It’s a design choice that takes confidence even for a professional florist, let alone a bride designing her own day: vegetables in your centerpieces could easily tip into gimmick, but here it landed as exactly what it was supposed to be — abundant, organic, a little playful, and completely true to a couple who built their relationship around shared meals and shared adventures. Scattered throughout the day were also photos from their travels, a soft, sentimental thread that kept the whole celebration anchored in them — not just imagery of a wedding, but a visual timeline of a partnership.

Why Red Butte Garden Works So Well for Spring Weddings

If you’re a couple currently weighing venues, here’s the honest case for Red Butte Garden in spring: very few venues in Salt Lake offer this much ceremony and photography real estate in a single location. Between the Fragrance Garden’s overlook, the Orangerie’s warm interior, and the Garden’s broader grounds, there’s an unusual amount of variety to work with — different light, different textures, different backdrops — without ever leaving the property.

One of my favorite perks of shooting here: Red Butte Garden offers a golf cart for weddings, which gives couples and their photographer real freedom to actually explore the grounds on the day rather than staying tethered to one corner of the property. We made good use of it with Hailey and Logan, and it opened up two of my favorite spots on the entire property — the Rose Garden and the Tea Garden. Both are quieter, more tucked-away corners than the Fragrance Garden or Orangerie, and both photograph beautifully: the Rose Garden with its romantic, layered structure, the Tea Garden with a stillness and intimacy that feels almost private, like you’ve wandered somewhere just for the two of you.

Here’s my honest takeaway as a photographer: there is simply more here than one wedding day has time for. Between the ceremony, the Orangerie, the golf cart ride, and the Rose and Tea Gardens, we had prime opportunity after prime opportunity and never quite enough minutes to capture all of it. If you’re planning a Red Butte Garden wedding, it’s worth building extra time into your day specifically for photos — or even planning a return trip after the wedding, just for portraits, to fully capture what the grounds have to offer. For couples who care about their photos and want a venue that keeps giving them new backdrops all day long, this is about as good as it gets in Salt Lake. I’d recommend it without hesitation to any couple chasing that same lush, layered, slightly wild spring look.

If you’re the kind of couple who’s been quietly worried your wedding vision is “too much” — too weird, too loud, too much disco ball and not enough sage green — I’d like to be the first to tell you it’s not. It’s just not for everyone, and that’s exactly the point. If you’re planning a Red Butte Garden wedding of your own, or honestly any wedding that refuses to behave, I’d love to talk through what’s possible. Whether your version of “completely you” looks like neon supermarket aisles and chili oil, or disco balls tucked into garden greenery, that’s the kind of day I love helping couples build.