Foxgloves & Roses

The studio calls itself a fine art wedding florist, and the description is doing real work. Nicola trained her eye on hedgerows before she trained it on anything formal, picking wildflowers on the walk home from school long before Foxgloves & Roses existed, and that early habit still shapes how a bouquet gets built now, less by rule than by the way flowers actually behave outdoors, leaning, climbing, spilling past their edges. A rose arch at one of the studio's Cotswold barn weddings makes the point plainly, apple branches and climbing stems dressed so thoroughly into a stone doorway that the flowers read as original to the building rather than added to it.

That doorway belonged to Cripps Barn, where Nikita and Edward married beneath a wide floral installation hung above the altar, stone walls doing most of the remaining work. Green apples were left scattered at the base of the arrangement, a detail that has nothing to do with polish and everything to do with a florist who is trying to make a room look grown rather than staged. It is the clearest statement of the studio's whole approach: work with what a building already has, and resist the urge to build a stage in front of it.

Colour, for Nicola, is a response to the couple rather than a signature to repeat. The portfolio runs from the softest register, powder blue delphinium, blush peony, ivory rose, at a string of weddings across Ardington House, through to something considerably bolder: deep sapphire and ruby at The Elephant Hotel in Pangbourne, or coral and blush beneath a domed garden pavilion. What holds the range together isn't a palette at all. It's the same loose, gathered hand, whichever colours it happens to be working in that week.

Ardington House turns up more than any other address in the studio's own account of its work, and it is worth noticing why. A garden wedding there for Leigh-Ann and Alex ran on soft powder blue, blush, peach and ivory from the ceremony meadow to an overflowing top table; for Ashlyn and Hunter, a Rococo-inspired palette of peach and butter yellow; for Lorna and Darren, something considerably more theatrical, crimson and blackberry layered until the effect turned genuinely dramatic. Three weddings, one venue, three entirely different rooms, which is close to the studio's whole pitch in miniature.

A studio built this way tends to attract couples who don't want the classic white-wedding template, and Nicola's own project list bears that out. A Bridgerton-inspired shoot at Ardington House worked wisteria and powder-blue ribbon into a Regency mood; at Aynhoe Park, Katriona and Ian's celebration leaned into colour and a little theatrical charm, coral and peach softened by flamingos and feather boas rather than restrained by them. It is proof the studio's floral fluency runs to playfulness as readily as to romance.

Scale is handled with the same range. A midwinter wedding at Oxford Town Hall for Robin and Darragh asked for something entirely different from a summer barn: dark evergreen foliage and frosted white blooms tumbling down the building's marble staircase and along its brass handrail, candlelight standing in for the season's missing daylight. Grand civic architecture and a timber-framed barn are, on paper, opposite briefs. In Nicola's hands they get the same underlying answer, flowers asked to soften the architecture rather than compete with it, scaled to whatever room they've been given.

Caswell House has hosted its own small run of the studio's work, each one different again. For Faye and Leigh, the ceremony arch was built as a graduated ombre, soft ivory and blush deepening through warm peach into richer pink, with airy meadow arrangements framing the aisle on either side. For Holly and Perry, the same venue took a quieter register entirely: late May peonies and garden roses in ivory, blush and green, echoing rather than competing with the honey-coloured stone around them. The venue barely changes; the flowers, deliberately, do.

At West Ilsley Church, an abundant floral installation transformed the lychgate into what the studio calls a place of welcome for Allana and Jack, garden roses and ruffled ranunculus carried through to the bouquet, the ceremony arch and an elegant marquee reception at Ardington House afterwards, one continuous idea across three different settings in a single day. Rachel and Ben took a similarly joyful approach at a Cotswold church and Lains Barn, coral peonies and sky-blue delphinium carrying the same loose, garden-grown lightness from the church to the reception.

The studio itself sits inside that same landscape. Foxgloves & Roses works from a barn on a hill in Letcombe Bassett, in the chalk downland south of Wantage, wide skies and quiet fields that Nicola credits directly for the softness and expansiveness of her designs. It is not an incidental detail. A florist who spends her working days looking at hedgerow and downland light tends to bring exactly that back into a bouquet, and the portfolio bears the theory out.

The flowers themselves lean British and seasonal wherever the brief allows it, high summer sweet pea and cottage-garden stems through the wedding season, evergreen and frosted white for the handful of couples who marry in winter. It is a preference stated plainly on the studio's own site rather than treated as a selling point, consistent with a business that grew out of an actual garden rather than a wholesale flower market.

Not every wedding runs through a grand address. Emma and Josh married under a marquee near Henley-on-Thames with the trees of their own garden growing straight through the tent, the studio leaning into that oddity rather than disguising it; Lucy and Chris gathered friends beneath another marquee for a wedding the studio describes simply as full of extra joy, peach and ivory loosened with airy pampas grass. A private garden and a stately home get the same attention, which is arguably the more telling fact about how the studio actually works.

None of this is guesswork dressed up as intuition. Every wedding begins with a design consultation, and every quote is built around a published floor: florals start from £4,500, with most couples investing somewhere between £5,500 and £8,000 depending on the scale of the day. It is an unusually direct number for a trade that mostly deals in enquiry forms, and it means a couple can gauge, from the first conversation, whether the studio's abundant, garden-grown style is the right fit for their budget as well as their taste.

Couples who've worked with the studio describe a similar experience regardless of the size of their day: a florist who listens closely to a loose brief and then runs further with it than expected, translating a mood board into something more particular than a couple could have named themselves. It is a quality that shows up as much in the marquee weddings as the historic-house ones, a designer working to the couple in front of her rather than to a house style she repeats from booking to booking.

Recognition arrived early. By 2017, six years into the business, Nicola had dressed around a hundred weddings and was shortlisted for the UK's Best Wedding Florist title at the UK Wedding Awards, a public-vote nomination covered at the time by the Oxford Mail, which traced her path from a PR job in London back to Oxfordshire and, eventually, to the garden she started digging up to grow more flowers than her own vases could hold. The studio today is trusted, in its own words, by venues including Blenheim Palace, Stowe House, the Ashmolean Museum and Caswell House, alongside the Ardington House weddings that recur so often in its own portfolio.

Away from the wedding calendar, Nicola keeps a monthly practice she calls the Artist's Table, still-life studies built from whatever the garden and the hedgerow are offering that particular month, beech and rosehip in November, narcissi and blossom by March. It reads as a private discipline rather than a marketing exercise, and it is easy to see it feeding back into the weddings themselves, the same eye for a season's particular colour, the same instinct to let a stem fall where it wants rather than force it into place. Explore Foxgloves & Roses on the Luxury Wedding Directory to see the studio's full profile and enquire about your wedding.