Rebecca Tapper

Eighteen years with plants

Rebecca was interested in plants from a young age. She went on to study horticulture & floristry at Bicton College in East Devon, and holds City & Guilds qualifications in both horticulture and floristry. Bicton is a specialist land-based college near Budleigh Salterton. It's been shortlisted for Floristry Training Provider of the Year.

After college, Rebecca opened her own flower and plant shop on the Devon high street and ran it for nearly two decades. It won Best Small Business of the Year along the way. That's where she learned the things you can't really learn on paper: which growers are worth using, how to acclimatise plants for the UK climate, which species actually survive in which rooms.

The pandemic closed the high street. Rebecca moved the whole operation online. She started with the stock she already had, contacted growers in the UK and the Netherlands, and put together a plant-care team. What the shop used to do in person, Houseplant UK now does by post.

Training & credentials

• City & Guilds in Horticulture & Floristry The vocational qualifications most working florists and horticulturists hold in the UK.
• Trained at Bicton College, Devon Specialist land-based college near Budleigh Salterton. Teaches horticulture, floristry and arboriculture on its own working nursery site.
• 18+ years hands-on experience Ran a flower and plant shop on the Devon high street for nearly two decades before launching Houseplant UK.
• Award-winning operator Her previous Devon floristry business won Best Small Business of the Year.
• Founding Director, Houseplant Ltd UK company registration: Companies House 13686240.
• APHA-registered Professional Operator Houseplant UK is registered with DEFRA/APHA as a Professional Operator and authorised to issue UK Plant Passports. Any business selling regulated plants at a distance in Great Britain has to hold this authorisation.

Expertise & specialism

Rebecca’s specialism sits between floristry and horticulture. A plant can be perfectly healthy in a grower’s glasshouse and still struggle the moment it reaches a British living room. She’s spent almost twenty years working out which plants cope with UK homes and which ones don’t, and the range at Houseplant UK is built around that.

Her team handles plant care and acclimatisation, pet-safe and low-light selection, winter shipping for delicate species like orchids, calatheas and African violets, biological pest control, and the APHA Plant Passport paperwork that sits under every UK plant sale.

The team she built

Houseplant UK’s plant-care team is around fifteen people. Several have worked professionally with plants for more than 20 years each. Combined, that’s over 50 years of hands-on experience across the team.

The whole plant-care team works under Houseplant UK’s DEFRA/APHA Professional Operator registration. That’s the same framework any UK commercial nursery works under: every regulated plant has to be inspected, plant-passported and logged before it leaves the building, and APHA records are held for at least three years. On top of that, each plant gets checked by three different teams during pick-and-pack, spends a quarantine period after arriving from the grower, and goes through a biological pest-control cycle before it’s dispatched.

On care and quality

Trusted by

Houseplant UK supplies plants to organisations across the UK and internationally, including:

• The Newt in Somerset
• University of Oxford
• University of Manchester
• Duolingo
• Solihull College & University Centre
• Singaporean Embassy, London