When Alex Crowder was a kid in the Ozarks, she would entertain herself by lying in the hayfields and looking up at the sky. “All of the grass would crowd my field of vision,” she recalls. “It’s a really vivid memory of intensely studying the natural world.” A few decades later, not much has changed. As the founder of Field Studies Flora, a Brooklyn studio with an emphasis on hyperseasonal, hyperlocal blooms, the 38-year-old florist spends her days sorting through foliage and stems that her team collects each week from within a 200-mile radius of New York City, which she then uses to create elaborate arrangements for clients like MoMA, Kallmeyer, and Roman and Williams. Well, not arrangements exactly—given she only produces site-specific work, Crowder tends to describe them as interventions. “It feels more intentional,” she notes. “I want people to stop in their tracks.”
Photo: Maureen Martinez-Evans
While her roots in rural Missouri continue to inform Crowder’s work to this day—“it’s truly a nature lover’s paradise,” she says—her journey to becoming one of New York’s most buzzed-about floral artists was a little more wayward. Upon graduating from the University of Missouri in graphic design, she established a local ad agency, before pivoting and moving to New York in the mid-2010s to create window displays for Anthropologie. “I just kept pulling flowers into everything I was making, and that was my first introduction to the flower market,” she explains. “In Missouri, to be a florist meant you were doing weddings, funerals, proms, and I wasn’t really interested in that world. In New York, I started to realize I could be making these massive, really interesting installations with natural materials.” In late 2020, Field Studies Flora was born—and soon became a runaway success. “I could see the arc of my life bending towards the natural world, and it was just a matter of trying to figure out how I was going to bring that to fruition,” Crowder notes.
