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.”

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.

This week, she’s breaking new ground (pun intended) by offering a handpicked line of tools. There are elegant woven foraging baskets made in collaboration with Erin Pollard of Underwater Weaving Studio, for foraging or the flower market, the leather holsters her team already uses, and florists’ aprons crafted from waxed cotton by Samuel Snider. All of this will be custom-made, with the exception of Crowder’s favorite Japanese shears. “I want to make it more accessible,” she says of what prompted her to branch out into producing her own tools. “I think there’s this idea that you have to take classes or do a workshop to become a florist, and it’s not true. We’ve been gathering since we started on this planet.”

Indeed, what sets Crowder apart from her green-fingered peers is not just the extraordinary beauty of her work, with its intense focus on the quirks and nuances—“the way a stem bends, or how a leaf is a bit bespeckled, or how a certain petal is kind of falling open,” in her words—but also her unique approach to responsible floristry, holding sourcing meetings with her team multiple times a week and going on regular field trips to visit the farms they source from.

“We know the farmers personally, we know their growing practices, we know the chemical use,” she explains. “Pesticide use is a huge problem in the floral industry, and it’s not regulated. I personally do not want to touch material that’s coated in chemicals. Sourcing flowers mindfully is not so easy, because the floral industry is not transparent.” She’s been known to turn down potential clients whose values don’t align with her steadfast belief in sourcing seasonally and locally: “It’s quite obvious when a company is trying to use us to position themselves as more mindful,” she says.

Crowder often uses the farm-to-table food and circular fashion movements as parallels to help explain her belief in confronting issues like supply chain transparency, pesticide use, and unsustainable shipping practices. “That comparison switches things in people’s minds, and consumers drive change,” Crowder notes. “They are the ones ultimately that will help us rebuild this industry, or at least reroute the industry.”

With the tools, now available online, she hopes to spread that message further. But she also simply wants to help others feel that same profound connection with nature she had staring up at those grasses as a child—and that she still feels every day, as she wrangles with the branches and blooms in her studio. “I think one of the reasons that I've been successful in creative endeavors is that I've been able to maintain a childlike wonder, particularly when it comes to the natural world,” Crowder adds, with a smile. “It’s a lovely way to work, in my opinion—to let nature dictate.