When the water along the Fairhope bayfront turns strange and the fish begin to come ashore, Baldwin Countians still shout a single word down the bay: jubilee. It is the rarest kind of local event, one no one schedules and no one can predict, and it has shaped the identity of this stretch of the Eastern Shore for generations. It should come as little surprise that when a Fairhope floral designer went looking for a name for her studio, she reached for the same word that neighbors shout when something wonderful, fresh and local appears at the water’s edge.
Jubilee Flowers, the boutique wedding and events studio led by designer Katherine Taylor, has become one of the Eastern Shore’s most recognizable names in event design. The studio specializes in lush, romantic, garden-style arrangements built from the freshest blooms the season allows, and its work now frames weddings, rehearsal dinners, showers and ceremonies from Fairhope and Point Clear to church sanctuaries across Baldwin County.
A Business Born on the Bayfront
The company’s roots reach back further than most clients realize. Jubilee Flowers was founded in 1996 by Kitty Chew, Taylor’s mother, who first built the business in Birmingham before relocating it to her bayfront home in Fairhope. Taylor grew up around the work, and in the early years she would fly in from Asheville, North Carolina, where she was living at the time, to join her mother’s team for the studio’s biggest weddings. When Taylor and her husband eventually moved to Fairhope, she joined the business full time, learning the trade at her mother’s side.
“I learned everything from her,” Taylor said. When Chew retired, Taylor took the studio over, and the workspace underneath her mother’s raised bayfront house, with its workbenches, storage and refrigeration, became the working heart of the business it remains today.
Designing for the Coast’s Biggest Days
Taylor describes a working rhythm that would exhaust most people. During peak wedding season she has balanced two weddings on each of two consecutive Saturdays, coordinating an experienced team while keeping every arrangement fresh. Freshness, she said, is the whole game. Her warehouse inventory runs well beyond flowers: candles, vases, votives, glassware, metal stands, chairs, linens and props all wait on hand, ready to dress a venue from doorway to dance floor.
Her portfolio shows the range. Tent supports become backdrops for flowered pillars inside the courtyard of the Fairhope Inn. A church’s arched wooden doors, framed by hundreds of fresh blossoms, greet wedding guests like something out of a tropical postcard. At The Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Taylor has attached fresh blooms along centuries-old southern oaks, letting flowers cascade up the limbs and across the root systems of the majestic trees on the resort’s grounds.
Every event starts with a conversation rather than a catalog. When one Fairhope mother called looking for centerpieces for a bayou-themed baby shower, complete with invitations featuring baby alligators and pelicans, Taylor asked about the invitation colors and built fresh blue flower sprigs, variegated greenery and off-white roses into rustic wooden keepsake containers, painting the boxes in soft blue. The roses were still beautiful a week later. For an April rehearsal dinner, she themed each table around the Mobile Bay jubilee itself: shrimp, mullet, the wharf, the fishing net.
A Recognizable Style, Recognized Widely
Taylor’s work has drawn attention well beyond Baldwin County. She is a three-time award winner in the Alexandra Farms Garden Rose Design Contest, taking honors in 2018, 2021 and 2023, and her garden-rose-forward designs have made her style easy for clients to spot. Garden roses such as Yves Piaget, with its rich magenta tones and strong scent, and Romantic Antike, prized for its high petal count and apricot color, are fixtures of her arrangements.
In 2023, Florists’ Review magazine named her fall wedding design the Best Overall Wedding in its annual Autumn Wedding Design Contest, selected from more than 50 submissions across North America. The magazine described her as a garden-loving wedding florist, constantly inspired by the natural world and every color of the rainbow.
Design With a Lighter Footprint
Taylor has also been blunt about the environmental cost of her industry. She has said it hurts her heart that the beauty she creates could harm the environment, and she works to lessen her studio’s impact through environmentally friendly design practices, a philosophy she says she follows in her personal life as much as her business. Clients in recent years have shifted toward brighter color palettes, a change she welcomed after years of softer neutrals dominating wedding work.
A Legacy Still Growing
For a studio named after the Bay’s most celebrated natural phenomenon, the mission has stayed remarkably consistent. Jubilee Flowers is more than bouquets and corsages; it is a family legacy carried forward on the Eastern Shore, one where a mother’s training, a daughter’s design instincts and the rhythms of Mobile Bay all meet at the door of the area’s biggest celebrations. In a town where neighbors still gather at the water’s edge to shout “jubilee,” the name fits exactly as intended: fresh, local and impossible to mistake for anything else.