Rebecca Mays has been designing wedding flowers since 2000. Her training was in theatre rather than horticulture, and she names that background directly as the reason her work reads as fun and dramatic rather than safe: peacock feather worked through a bouquet of peony, a bridal bouquet built entirely from chocolate cosmos, an unfussy jam-jar arrangement for a day that never asked for anything grander. Two decades on, she still works alone, taking on a limited number of weddings each year.
A bride and her three bridesmaids with peony bouquets, beneath a wisteria arch. Photograph by Eddie Judd Photography
Rebecca's own account of what she does is direct: "I love to create flowers with a difference." That difference is rarely about scale. It shows up instead in small, specific choices, feathers instead of a filler stem, a chocolate-brown bloom instead of the expected white, a jam jar instead of a formal vase, decisions that read as personal rather than decorative, and that come from a designer who still handles every stage of a wedding herself rather than passing it down a studio hierarchy.
That personal approach has built the kind of reputation that outlasts a single booking. Tiffany Grant-Riley, a stylist and creative director, has recommended and hired Rebecca for her own clients' weddings for six years running, and when it came to her own wedding, she says plainly that Rebecca "was the first florist on my list to call." A second testimonial, from a bride named Helen, is shorter but says something similar in fewer words: the bouquet "looked (and smelled) amazing," and the room, in her words, had the wow-factor.
There is no published price list anywhere in Rebecca's own material, and no minimum spend quoted either. Every wedding begins instead with a conversation about the day itself, the venue, the season, and the couple's own taste, and a quote is built from that rather than read off a fixed tier. It is a slower way to sell flowers than a printed package, and it is also the only way to genuinely design "with great imagination... individually," in Tiffany Grant-Riley's own phrase, rather than fitting a couple to whatever package happens to be nearest their budget.
Season is the other constant. Rebecca has written her own guide to what each part of the year offers a florist willing to look past the obvious choices: the rich, jewelled colour of dahlias in autumn, tumbling blackberries around a cut-glass cake stand, dog rose and dark-berried Viburnum through winter, tree blossom and Muscari in spring, chocolate cosmos massed in a vintage cocoa tin for a late-summer party. None of it is templated. It is a working method built around what a given month actually offers.
A long wedding table dressed with wildflowers in bottles
Her own verdict on the seasons runs against the obvious assumption, too. "It is often thought that the summer is the best season for flowers," she has written, "but for me the winter is the most creative time. There are so many wonderful berries and foliage to use." It is a small admission that says a great deal about how she works: the constraint of a quieter month is treated as a design problem worth solving, not a season to get through until the roses come back.
"For me, the winter is the most creative time. There are so many wonderful berries and foliage to use."
, On Rebecca Mays
The same log runs on through the brighter months. Spring, in her account, is tree blossom in a simple vase or a blousy mass of cream David Austin roses with sprigs of pale blue Muscari, narcissi in vintage teacups, sweet peas in small medicine bottles. Summer brings hydrangea in colours running from classic white to a deep, vintage-leaning purple-blue, Sweet William tied into tin cans with ribbon for something economical and pretty, and, by late summer, the chocolate cosmos that gives one of her most distinctive bridal bouquets its colour.
The portfolio's detail shots make the same case at a smaller scale. A macro study of peach rose, white peony and daisy sits a few images from a pink-rose table centrepiece, each one composed as its own small picture rather than a cropped fragment of a wider display. It is the kind of close, considered work that a couple only really appreciates once the photographs come back, long after the flowers themselves are gone.
A bouquet detail in peach rose, white peony and daisy
A table centrepiece detail in pink rose. Photograph by Eddie Judd Photography
A decorated bicycle, its basket filled with foxgloves and a small chalkboard reading "Al ♥ Tom, 28.05.16," is one of the few pieces of real, dated evidence in the portfolio of an actual wedding day rather than a styled shoot: a real couple, a real date, a detail piece built for arrival rather than for the aisle or the table. It is a reminder that the bulk of this kind of work exists for a single afternoon and is never seen again outside a photograph.
A decorated bicycle with foxgloves, for Al and Tom's wedding. Photograph by Eddie Judd Photography
Details like the bicycle matter because so much of a florist's wedding-day work is genuinely temporary. A pedestal arrangement is struck the same evening it is admired; a bouquet is pressed or thrown away within the week. What is left afterward is the photograph, and it is the reason a working florist's portfolio tends to mix two different kinds of image: a styled shoot, built purely to show what is possible, and a real wedding day, built to answer one couple's brief and then dismantled. Both appear across Rebecca's own gallery, and neither is presented as the other.
The clearest example of a real, dated wedding in the portfolio is the Asylum Chapel in Peckham, a genuinely unusual choice of venue: a ruined, atmospheric chapel interior, married in September 2021. Rebecca dressed the aisle with floral pew-ends running its full length toward a mass of candlelight at the altar, working with the room's own faded grandeur rather than trying to brighten or soften it.
A bride in a red dress with a floral crown, and her groom, at the Asylum Chapel
The couple themselves matched the setting. The bride wore a red dress rather than white, a floral crown rather than a veil, and carried a jewel-toned bouquet of deep red, burgundy and orange blooms that answered both the dress and the chapel's own worn stonework, while the groom's buttonhole picked up the same warm palette in miniature. It is exactly the kind of unconventional brief, a bride who has already decided against a white dress and a plain bouquet, that Rebecca's theatrical instinct seems built to answer, rather than one she would need to be talked into.
Beyond weddings, Rebecca teaches her own one-to-one wreath-making classes and takes on lifestyle and editorial shoots between bookings, work that keeps the same seasonal instinct in daily practice through the year rather than confined to a wedding season. A styled shoot in the gardens of the Rookery in Streatham, close to where she lives, produced one of the more painterly images in the portfolio: a model in a loose crown of hellebore and eucalyptus, a wildflower garland run the length of a long table, the kind of work that reads as pure design experiment rather than a commercial brief.
A model wears a flower crown of hellebore and eucalyptus, at a Streatham garden shoot
None of this reads as a portfolio stuck in the past. A naked wedding cake finished with fresh, edible flowers, a real table plan just visible behind it, and a second cake dressed with figs, berries and rustic glass vases, both shot on a phone rather than staged for a professional camera, are recent, genuine wedding-day work, evidence the practice itself has continued well past the older studio photographs that make up most of the gallery. Her own Instagram account, still posting through the weeks before this was written, confirms the same thing more directly.
A hand-held bridal bouquet in autumn tones, dahlia and rose
Rebecca also works beyond the wedding day itself. The same florist who dresses a chapel aisle or a bridal bouquet also handles deliveries and flower subscriptions, corporate and party flowers, and small gifts for anniversaries and other occasions, alongside the lifestyle and editorial shoots already mentioned. It keeps a solo florist working through the quieter months of a wedding calendar, and it means the seasonal instinct that shapes a wedding bouquet is also being exercised, week to week, on far smaller and less visible commissions.
A wedding's flowers last a single day, and in Rebecca Mays's case that day might be a formal church wedding, a ruined chapel in Peckham, or a garden party that only ever asked for a jam jar and a handful of cornflower. What runs underneath all of it, more than two decades on from her first booking in 2000, is a designer who still treats every event individually, chooses her flowers by the season rather than the calendar of weddings, and keeps just enough theatre in the work, a little peacock feather here, an unlikely chocolate-brown bloom there, to make it recognisably hers. Enquire directly with Rebecca Mays on the Luxury Wedding Directory to check availability for your wedding.
A table centrepiece detail in pink rose. Photograph by Eddie Judd Photography
A bouquet detail in blush and lavender, against wisteria. Photograph by Eddie Judd Photography
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Credits
- Florist
- Rebecca Mays
- Founder
- Rebecca Mays
- Based
- London
- @rebeccamaysflowers
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