10 Questions with Floral Designer Emily Thompson – Gardenista

“I love storytelling through design and art,” says Emily Thompson of Emily Thompson Flowers. “And what better material in the world to do that with than plants.” The sought-after floral designer, who has an M.F.A. in sculpture, taps into the wild and the witchy (“the dark arts,” she jokes) to create exuberant, gravity-defying installations and arrangements that celebrate the beauty and fierceness of nature—warts and all.

“I want people to understand how powerful these living things are,” she says. Using local growers and foragers whenever possible, she’s created showstopping work for fashion designers like Ulla Johnson and Jason Wu and museums such as The Frick Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art; she’s even designed holiday decorations at the Obama White House.

“It all comes back to the living natures of plants,” she says. “We try to find ways to expose, dramatize, and, on some level, narrate them.” Below, she shares some of her floral favorites:

The tool you can’t live without?

I use my basic ARS clippers for everything including very serious branches. We also love Fiskars PowerGear 2  ratchet loppers for large branches. And I just got a Fiskars Tree Pruner Pole Saw for Christmas for foraging.

Favorite floral design book?

Constance Spry’s How to do the Flowers. The certainty!

I learned everything from her. I find a great kinship with her and the humbleness of what she strove to do. Her sense of materials is unmatched—and she didn’t have the resources we have now. She was ingenious as far as finding materials, procuring and growing them, and seeking ways to do things that nobody else would even bother trying with them.

I also love that she was wonderfully frumpy. She put on no airs, had no diva nature. She was a worker. She seemed like she loved to tackle the most ridiculous challenge: The most insane problem is her friend. She also understood context and how people would read flowers. I greatly admire her for her deep respect and clarity she gave to each flower and how she would show it to its greatest effect. She followed where the flower would lead her as opposed to forcing it into someone else’s idea of convention. Her imagination, inventiveness, and incessant reinvention—It’s all just so powerful.

Favorite place to visit for inspiration?

I love extreme landscapes: volcanos; craggy, rocky, difficult places; and my family’s home in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Splurge-worthy flowers?

They are all very expensive, and much more so since Covid! I love poppies of all kinds, heirloom chrysanthemums make me wild, and I have a bottomless thirst for fritillaria of all kinds. But some other rare things I covet: Bessara, trollius, and lotus.