Wildabout

Kew Gardens keeps a short, curated list of approved florists, chosen for their understanding of the venue's spaces and its logistical constraints as much as their design eye. Wildabout has held its place on that list for years, working across three of Kew's distinct wedding spaces: the glass-walled Nash Conservatory, the candlelit Orangery, and the Temperate House, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world. Being accredited, the studio has said of the arrangement, is not a badge. It is a responsibility, one that means every installation has to respect a UNESCO World Heritage Site before it can impress a wedding guest.

For one wedding at the Nash Conservatory, the studio built its ceremony altar from real tree trunks rather than any conventional arch, branches trained and laden with cascading olive, fern and trailing Spanish moss. At the base, a wildflower meadow of blue delphinium, blush and lavender rose and white stock swept across the floor, a garden built inside a garden that was already, itself, largely glass. It stands as one of the most ambitious ceremony installations the studio has attempted at Kew, botanical rather than merely decorative, flowers arranged to look as though they had simply grown there.

A year later, for a showcase staged in the same room, the studio went the opposite direction. Tall foliage columns on sculptural black frames flanked the ceremony position, and a generous aisle meadow of white rose, lisianthus and wild green botanicals ran towards the doors, pared back rather than piled high. Quieter, in the studio's own description, but no less considered. Read side by side, the two Nash Conservatory weddings make the same point from opposite ends: restraint and abundance are simply two settings on the same design instinct, chosen for the couple rather than defaulted to.

Kew's Grade I-listed Orangery belongs to the evenings. High ceilings and grand proportions give the room an atmosphere that shifts as the daylight fades, and the studio has leaned into that shift directly: a long banquet table dressed with a forest of multicoloured pillar candles on tall gold stands, votives and tapers at varying heights beside them. Chair backs carried their own small moment of colour, posies of blue nigella, clematis and delphinium in purple and mauve. The Orangery, the studio has found, rewards floristry that leans into warmth rather than competing with the candlelight.

Nothing at Kew matches the Temperate House for sheer drama. Its iron and glass vault is the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world, tropical palms and tree ferns already forming a living interior no floral designer could realistically outdo. For one wedding there, Wildabout worked with that fact rather than against it: rich centrepieces of phalaenopsis orchid, hydrangea, garden rose and delphinium in purple, lilac and blush, luxurious without trying to fill a room that was already full. The skill, as the studio puts it, is knowing exactly where not to add more.

That same instinct for restraint carried the studio well beyond Kew's glasshouses. For DJ Fat Tony and Stavros Agapiou's wedding at The Londoner, the brief was direct: modern and stylish, nothing traditional and nothing overdone. The ceremony arch became the day's standout moment, built to frame the couple as they exchanged vows rather than overwhelm the room behind them, and the reception tables carried the same clean, considered register through to candlelight. Tony and Stavros's own account of the day, posted a year on, still reads like the highest kind of client review a studio can hope for.

"From our very first meeting, you completely understood our vision and brought it to life beyond anything we could have imagined," the couple wrote. "From the incredible ceremony arch to the beautifully designed tables, every detail felt perfectly curated." It is a testimonial that names Leanne directly, and it is not an isolated case. Across the studio's published reviews, from a bride's chuppah of dreams to a corporate client's praise for thinking about the event as a whole, it is consistently Leanne who is credited by name for understanding a brief before it is fully spoken.

At The Wilderness, the restored conservatory at Chiswick House, Sarah and James wanted their wedding to feel like a hidden garden rather than a venue booking, and the setting did most of the persuading on its own: ancient trees, waterfowl and winding pathways surrounding a Georgian glasshouse a few minutes from the city. Wildabout answered with cascading bloom and abundant greenery draped from the Conservatory's ironwork overhead, and a single dramatic tree installed behind the bar as the room's anchoring gesture. Unstructured, seasonal and, in the studio's own words, always unique.

Not every wedding the studio builds is a full venue transformation. A bride named Adina, married beneath a chuppah Wildabout describes only as being built "of dreams," wrote afterward to thank "gorgeous Leanne" and her team directly, a reminder that the studio's reach extends into the specific, structural demands of a religious ceremony as readily as it does a hotel ballroom. A chuppah, like a ceremony arch, has to hold its shape and its symbolism at once, and it is exactly the kind of commission that rewards a florist who listens before designing.

The studio's most photographed signature, though, may be its suspended work. For one wedding, photographed by Gione da Silva, a canopy of pampas grass and dried bloom in amber and cream was hung the full length of a dining room, one continuous gesture holding the whole space together rather than a room of separate centrepieces. Elsewhere, wisteria has been trained to hang from a Georgian ceiling at the Clementine at Syon Park, and a mirrored install at another London reception turned a run of candelabra into its own floral chandelier. Overhead work, done properly, is closer to engineering than arranging.

The studio's country-house work carries a softer register. At Sezincote, the Gloucestershire estate known for its Mughal-inspired architecture, photographer Holly Clark documented a floral archway built into the house's honey-coloured stone, and a garden entrance dressed with the same restraint the studio brings to its grandest London ballrooms. It is evidence the aesthetic travels: an arch built for a City hotel and an arch built for a Cotswold garden read, in Wildabout's hands, as the work of the same design mind, adjusted to the architecture rather than repeated regardless of it.

The portfolio's range shows up as much in its couples as its venues. A Highland wedding paired a groom in full Scottish dress with a bride carrying a deep red bouquet, a world away from the pale, glasshouse palette of Kew. Gabrielle and Tom married in July 2019 as their venue lit up at dusk behind them, and Sara and Gary's reception carried a tall lilac hydrangea centrepiece that owed nothing to any of the studio's more restrained white work. Across a decade of real weddings, the throughline is not a single colour or flower but a willingness to design differently each time.

The studio's process starts, by its own account, with an informal consultation at the Battersea studio, a conversation about favourite flowers, style and the desired colour palette before anything is proposed. From there, Wildabout builds a bespoke design proposal that walks the couple through its interpretation of the brief, a chance to see the vision resolved on paper before a single stem is ordered. It is a considered, two-stage process, and it is one reason a studio capable of a nine-metre pampas canopy can also be trusted with something as intimate and specific as a chuppah.

Wildabout's accredited-florist status now runs across Claridge's, The Connaught, The Lanesborough, Spencer House, the Wallace Collection, Sir John Soane's Museum, the Royal Naval College, Annabel's, Cliveden House and Battersea Arts Centre, alongside Kew Gardens, The Wilderness and The Londoner already explored here. A banner across the website now reads Ibiza office now open, the clearest sign yet that a studio built almost entirely on London's grandest interiors has started designing considerably further from Silverthorne Road.

A wedding's flowers last a single day, but the tree-trunk altar at Kew, the pampas canopy over a London dinner, the ceremony arch at The Londoner built to frame two grooms rather than overwhelm them, are what a couple and their guests remember afterward. For a couple who want their florist to design the room rather than decorate it, and to be trusted with a request as specific as a chuppah or as vast as a Victorian glasshouse, Wildabout's run of accredited London weddings is difficult to match. Explore Wildabout on the Luxury Wedding Directory to see the studio's full profile and enquire about your wedding.