NOTES ON FLOWERS
With Alex Crowder
If you’ve had the chance to pass by our West Village boutique, you would have noticed our incredible floral displays. These are created by the team at Field Studies Flora, and installed each week under the direction of Founder, Alex Crowder. Instead of flower markets and imported blooms, the studio works in close collaboration with foragers who source local wildflowers. This close connection to nature, or rather, yielding to nature, is at the core of Alex’s practice and emanates from every stem she touches.
Photography by Kalum Ko.
What's your design philosophy or approach to working with florals, grasses, and varying sites and seasons?
Everything we create at Field Studies is in service of something larger than the arrangement itself. I want people to notice what's already growing alongside them, the things they walk past without ever really seeing. The plant world is never static; it's in constant flux, and the work should hold that truth rather than smooth it over.
There's a wonderful looseness to your arrangements; a lack of control, somehow. How does nature direct your work? How do you direct nature?
I love this quote from Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Nature has many ways of reminding us that we have control over very little, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise. My work is a yielding, a release to nature and ultimately an exhalation of it.
Where do you source your florals for Posse's arrangements?
This time of year, most of what you'll see in the shop is coming from our foraging team out in New Jersey. We work in close collaboration with them, specifically the brilliant Nicole Spadafora. More often than not, she includes sweet little notes in the buckets that travel to our studio - things like "something weird and special for you!" Each ingredient in an arrangement has made its own long commute to get to wherever it ends up.
What do your flowers teach you?
There is still so much to learn. Be still. Be patient. The earth, if you’re open to it, will remind you of that daily.
What's been on your mind this summer?
Pollinators, almost exclusively. I'm actually in the middle of writing an essay on the subject as we speak. We florists like to think of ourselves as the ones making the choices - this stem, that vessel, this gesture toward asymmetry - but the real design work happened weeks earlier, in a field, in a transaction between a flower and an insect that had nothing to do with us. A bumblebee doesn't know it's shaping next year's bloom; it's just hungry. And that hunger is the whole reason we have anything to arrange at all.
What book or books do you always return to reference or for inspiration?
Anything by Andy Goldsworthy, whatever wildflower field guide is nearest at hand, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and Mary Oliver's American Primitive. There's a passage in Rilke where he tells his young correspondent that if his everyday life feels impoverished, the fault lies not with life itself but with a failure to summon its riches. That's stayed with me longer than almost anything else I've read on craft. It applies as much to a bucket of foraged flowers as it does to a poem. And speaking of Mary Oliver, there’s a new documentary, Saved by the Beauty of the World, which I’m looking forward to seeing. Though she's a well-known figure in poetry, there's a real understory to what her inner world was like - the fame sat oddly with someone that private, that devoted to solitude and long walks over public life.
Do you have a favourite flower?
It’s more of a revolving door of favorites. Today it's Monarda Fistulosa, wild bergamot, or bee balm if you prefer the common name. It's the lovely purple flowers seen in the images we captured at the store!