By Whitney Cole
“Wow, Self. You sure do photograph and write a lot of blog posts about flowers. Maybe you should try something different.” — Said me, never.
“Wow, Self. You sure do photograph and write a lot of blog posts about flowers. Maybe you should try something different.” — Said me, never.
Because I can’t seem to shy away from including floral images, I thought I’d share how I make my crowns/wreaths without the help of tapes, wires, pins, or even scissors in some cases.
I often try to make crowns and wreaths out of whatever leftover flowers I may have or what sort of flowers I have growing in my environment. However, for the sake of making this post in the middle of the fall in Richmond, I settled for buying some at the grocery store. I check in the marked down bins first because I like to spend as little money as possible, but I also need to look at the quality of the flowers and the type I’m actually needing for the crowns.
Because I’m not using any binding or adhesive, I have to pay attention to the stems of the flowers I’m looking at. I’ve noticed that flowers with flexible stems are the best for the primary structure of the wreath or crown. Wildflowers in general tend to be good for this because their stems are so small and not rigid. Any sort of vine or young branch is good as well. Flowers with stiffer stems can still be used, but they’re better for tucking into the structure once it has been established. You will hopefully see what I mean by this as I continue.
I mainly bought some roses, mums, and Limonium (tiny purple flowers on the right), which despite the $10 splurge ended up being my most used flowers. I also went around and found leaves of various colors and sizes in hopes of tucking them in at the end. 
For smaller, easily flexible stems like those of wildflowers, I simply gather them and begin braiding them like a french braid in hair. However, because I had bigger, more substantially-stemmed flowers here, I prepped them by gently and gradually bending the stems with my thumbs, working down the length of the stem. Not only does this get them ready to be in a curved position, but weeds out (gosh, pun) the flowers that aren’t going to withstand that sort of tension.
Once I’ve determined my staple flower or green for the wreath or crown, I begin arranging them in a way that seems most efficient for creating a structure. In this case, I took a bit of my Limonium and then laid another on top of it, but slightly staggered. This put the two pieces’ “branches” in a position that allowed for them to be wrapped or braided with one another.
I had a pretty small rose with a flexible stem, so I added that next. I did this in a very similar way to how one would gather another piece of hair in a french braid. I just chose one of my three braiding strands (I often go for the one which looks the weakest or seems it will run out first) and positioned the rose on top of it so that I could secure it as I continued braiding.
If you look at the first image above, you can see that after these pieces were braided, the side to the right of the rose was looking a bit wimpy. To add strength and interest to this portion, I decided to incorporate a thicker-stemmed flower into the already established weaving.
I had a strand of Alstroemeria which I tucked into the gaps of the braid. To try to diminish the chances of the stem being put under too much tension, I couldn’t push the stem all the way through yet. Instead, I pushed the stem partially through a space towards the top, then bent the lower part of the stem so that it would feed into another lower part of the braid. After that was accomplished, I just slowly worked the stem through each gap until it was pulled through and secured into the structure. Think of when you have to do something like this.
As I added each stem and bloom, I had to almost keep reminding the flowers that they were going to be forming a circle. As each piece was woven together, I was still working to bend and form everything into an arc shape. The more I did this as I went along, the more I was accommodating for a rounded tension in the entire structure rather than waiting until everything was secured to start bending.
The part that (for me) requires the most patience is trying to get the two ends of the arc to work together and complete the circle in a non-destructive way. Now, when braiding wildflowers together, I can usually just keep adding links and then sort of “tie” the back together with those flexible stems. With stubborn, rigid branches it becomes difficult to bind them without creating a very weak and lazy link to the crown or wreath. This is why it is most useful to use stems of different textures and lengths, because stems that are staggered are much easier to incorporate into the other side of the circle than a whole bunch of stems that stop abruptly at the same time.
If you look at the picture above, you see that I tried to allow for some of my more flexible stems to be quite a bit longer than the others. This hopefully allows the joining of the two sides to be more seamless.
The following stages are very difficult to photograph step-by-step because they require a lot of patience, attention, and the use of both hands. What I did next was begin to try and take the pieces from one side and sort of lay them over stems from the other, not terribly unlike the way I incorporated the rose or Alstroemeria flowers earlier. Whatever seems to mingle without too much convincing is usually a good route to take.
The photo above is a bit of an in-progress shot, where the new branches and stems were being woven together. As I tried to braid the old pieces together, I would also add other flexible stems to reinforce the connection
The circular structure must always be acknowledged or some strange shape will begin to form. As I did in this case, make sure to continue working around the circle and making the stems take that rounded shape together.
For the more structured pieces, the next part is the most fun for me. Once the main structure has been crafted, it becomes easy to tuck different flowers, greens, or really whatever into the woven gaps. In this case I incorporated the fall leaves as well as some of those more stubborn-stemmed flowers.
The final product was hung on a small nail on my apartment door.
The final product for that is shown below also, as a crown!
(Below I’ve included a video that may or may not show the process better than I have attempted to explain!)
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Whitney Cole is a tiny Southern firecracker from small-town Virginia She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 with a B.F.A. in Photography. Her work to date has been an investigation of her Southern heritage. Follow her on Instagram for lots of pictures of her dog and trees.
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