These Are Not Your Traditional Holiday Wreaths

Another Hackney-based florist, the Flower Appreciation Society, run by Anna Day, 39, and Issy Crossman, 31, gives leftover blooms cut for summer weddings a second life with wreaths of seedlings, wild grasses, dried hops and branches, while the Cotswolds-based florist Willow Crossley, 38, assembles her garlands by hand from pink wax flower, helichrysum (also known as the everlasting flower, or immortelle, for its ability to look alive long after it has died and dried out), echinops, limonium and berried populus, among other flora. Meanwhile, the West London-based studio Flowerbx, from Whitney Bromberg, 47, a former communications executive at Tom Ford, offers bespoke wreaths of neutral-toned, single-variety flora, including processions of delicate daisy chains and sprays of silver grass, thinly layered like mille-feuille.

“It’s an amazing moment when, suddenly, the fleshiness of a flower has skeletonized,” says Kitten Grayson, 36, of her organic cutting garden in Somerset, where she spent weeks crafting her garlands from hundreds of dried dahlias and gomphrena. “In wreaths, they become shrines to the landscape, a kind of porthole, a memory box of the last year, filled with things that may not be in season now but have gone along the months with us. Then, of course, we’ll give them up.” For, in the end, like all things, wreaths return to the earth, if only after being stitched into bounteous circles — again, again and again.

Photo assistants: Stephen Elwyn Smith, Emilio Garfath. Set designer’s assistant: Tom Hope