“Have you actually been to the North Meadow at Golden Gardens on a summer weekend?” Seattle Parks event scheduler Callie Berry asks prospective brides when they contact her in January to reserve a wedding site for July.

The first week of January usually means packing up the holiday or watching for the school bus, but for staff in charge of scheduling at Seattle Parks it is the beginning of wedding and special event madness.

Anyone planning a ceremony or special event in a Seattle park, with two exceptions, cannot make a reservation until 8:30 a.m. on the first business day of the new year.

My call was logged in at 8:36 a.m.

On Monday, Jan. 4, there had been a half an inch of rain since midnight when the starting bell rang at 8:30 a.m. on the Seattle Parks' wedding planning season.

Four days later, the rainfall had reached 1.5 inches and there weren’t any unbooked weekends left in July at Golden Gardens Bathhouse.

The North Meadow is currently a swamp that belongs to waterfowl – by late-June, wedding parties will be competing with kite flyers and soccer players, fitness classes and lots of Frisbees.

Callie Berry was born and raised in Ballard. She finds it fitting that as a Seattle Parks employee she is making up for years spent at Golden Gardens.

As she says, “There’s always more going on at Golden Gardens than we know about.”

Four years ago, she was remarried at the Golden Gardens Bathhouse.

After four days of scheduling for 2010, Berry could already report that it will be a record-breaking year for weddings in Seattle parks based on the number of conflicts.

Normally on the first day, there will be one or two people who request the same park on the same day. This year there were 20 people on the first day of booking.

The volume of requests stayed high all week, and booking will become trickier as dates continue to fill.

Of course, people want to get married in parks other than Ballard. There are hot spots in West Seattle, Magnolia and Queen Anne, but Ballard always holds its own.

Berry reports a surprising surge in requests for Gas Works Park for this summer.

Many callers want Berry to tell them where they should get married. She’ll tell them about some lesser-known jewels. such as Ella Bailey on Queen Anne or Leschi Park, but she is not a wedding planner, nor can she begin to catalog the strange questions posed every day. Her most common response is, “How would you get that into the park?”

She’s surprised by how often they’re asked, “Can we roast a whole pig?” The answer is only at one of the parks with designated fire rings and therefore probably only a very small pig.

Years ago, the first business day in January was also the first day to reserve picnic shelters, but combined demand was untenable and they got split apart.

Information on reserving picnic shelters will be available online in mid-February, and written requests will be accepted during the month of March.

Seattle Parks staff will then use a lottery system to grant reservations and open up available spots to callers as of April 1. Picnic reservations can be for a half-day, allowing for two reservations per day.

Parson’s Garden and Kubota Gardens are the two most-popular wedding locations, but they are booked on a rolling annual basis (so if you’d like to book Parson’s Garden for next January, you’re free to do so).

Other locations, such as Ballard Locks or the Rose Garden at Woodland Park Zoo, are not booked through Seattle Parks.

In Seattle, there is a $200 fee and many limitations on usage, but many of the locations and views are incomparable.

Only one ceremony is allowed per day per park because, after all, these parks belong to the public, which is why a couple may exchange vows with a volleyball game as their backdrop at Golden Gardens.

By the time the grass is dry at the North Meadow and the turtles are sunning in the pond, the weekends between May and September will be almost completely booked.

The shelters will be accounted for on Saturdays, though deserted during the week. On weekends, the Golden Gardens parking lot will overflow, the sidewalks will fill and from shelter to shelter groups will each be speaking in a different language, celebrating a different event or a different culture.

In January, it’s hard to think of summer’s endless daylight hours, but the phones have been ringing incessantly at the scheduling office housed in the South Lake Union Armory with people brave and foresighted enough to envision clear skies and 50 guests in the North Meadow.

As for my call logged in at 8:36 a.m. for a certain Ballard location for next June. sorry brides and grooms, that park is mine - for better or worse.