Love is: tying the knot in your garden
Amy Briggs ,34, and fiancé Paul Don egan ,40, live in a tenement flat in Edinburgh’s Leith area.
She is the senior marketing manager at a social enterprise firm and he works in the hospitality sector.
They had spent a year and a half planning their summer wedding in Italy after getting engaged in Rome in September 2018.
“Our wedding was due to be in Tuscany in June, with about 80 guests and a week of celebrations,” she said.
“We began to be worried about the wedding once the world went into lock down, and ended up cancelling the event in the middle of April.
“Solen was originally going to be our photographer over there. She takes the most amazing photographs and has worked on some of my friends’ weddings before.
“Her shots are un pretentious and observant rather than staged, and even before we had got engaged I thought I would be asking her when the day eventually arose.
“We had continued to talk about what we might do during lock down, with lots of questions from friends and family and not really wanting to wait until next year.
“We live in an Edinburgh tenement block and are lucky enough to have a resident who is a landscape gardener and has truly transformed our shared space into something quite beautiful.
“I literally woke up one day in July and turned to Paul and said why don’t we just do it in the garden.”
They immediately searched out a celebrant to perform the ceremony and booked the same day.
“So we will be married in our shared tenement garden with 18 friends and family – with all the chairs from our house, rugs, tables and plants all brought down for decoration.
“After that it’s tacos and margaritas at Bodega, on Lei th walk. Our first date was to a Mexican restaurant, so this also seemed apt.”