The Tamesis
When Alex Crowder was a child in the Ozarks, she would entertain herself by lying on a hayfield and looking up at the sky. “All the grass would take over my field of vision,” she recalls. “It was a very vivid memory of delving into the natural world.” Decades later, not much has changed. As the founder of Brooklyn studio Field Studies Flora, the 38-year-old florist spends her days cataloging the leaves and stems her team collects weekly from within a 200-mile radius of New York City, which she then uses to create elaborate floral arrangements for clients including the Museum of Modern Art, Kallmeyer, Roman and Williams. Well, not exactly arrangements—Claude prefers to describe them as interventions, given that she only creates site-specific works. “It feels more purposeful,” she notes. “I want people to stop.”
Photo: Maureen Evans
While her rural Missouri roots still influence Claude’s work today—“It’s truly a nature lover’s paradise,” she says—her journey to becoming one of New York’s most talked-about floral artists has been a bit more willful. After graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in graphic design, she founded a local advertising agency before moving to New York in the mid-2010s to create window displays for Anthropologie. “I continue to incorporate flowers into everything I do, and this was my first exposure to the flower market,” she explains. “In Missouri, being a florist meant you were doing weddings, funerals, proms, and I wasn’t really interested in that world. In New York, I started realizing I could make these huge, really interesting installations out of natural materials.” In late 2020, Field Studies Flora was born, and it quickly became a huge success. “I could see the arc of my life tilting toward the natural world, and it was just a matter of trying to figure out how I was going to get there,” Crowder noted.
