When Alex Crowder was a kid in the Ozarks, she would entertain herself by lying in the hayfields and looking up at the sky. \u201cAll of the grass would crowd my field of vision,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt\u2019s a really vivid memory of intensely studying the natural world.\u201d A few decades later, not much has changed. As the founder of Field Studies Flora<\/a>, 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<\/a>, which she then uses to create elaborate arrangements for clients like MoMA, Kallmeyer, and Roman and Williams. Well, not arrangements exactly\u2014given she only produces site-specific work, Crowder tends to describe them as interventions. \u201cIt feels more intentional,\u201d she notes. \u201cI want people to stop in their tracks.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: Maureen Martinez-Evans<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n While her roots in rural Missouri continue to inform Crowder\u2019s work to this day\u2014\u201cit\u2019s truly a nature lover\u2019s paradise,\u201d she says\u2014her journey to becoming one of New York\u2019s 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. \u201cI just kept pulling flowers into everything I was making, and that was my first introduction to the flower market,\u201d she explains. \u201cIn Missouri, to be a florist meant you were doing weddings, funerals, proms, and I wasn\u2019t really interested in that world. In New York, I started to realize I could be making these massive, really interesting installations with natural materials.\u201d In late 2020, Field Studies Flora was born\u2014and soon became a runaway success. \u201cI 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,\u201d Crowder notes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/assets.vogue.com\/photos\/69fc0d71d75ea86874698653\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/FIELDSTUDIESFLORA13331.jpg\"\/)
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