The wild and beautiful world of florist Emily Thompson

Emily Thompson, an artist with the background in sculpture, came into the New York City floral scene fifteen years ago, and her wildly imaginative designs made her a sensational hit with her fashion and design clients. Her creations evoke meadows, fields, forests, often of large scale. She has designed work for The White House, for couture shows, for MoMA, and for my magazine, Martha Stewart Living. And now she has published a beautiful book,

No, but it did give a certain theater to the experience.

It did, it did. It was always nice nursery kitchen. Is this charming French restaurant way downtown Manhattan. But I love flowers and I love plants, and I have and I looked through your book very very carefully this morning again on my way here. Your work is creative, it's dramatic. It's so unique. You have described it as a kind of science fiction. And I loved reading everything you wrote in the book and your title pages just so strange and evocative of all the plants you use and the

Yes, we call it the muck.

I wish you could come to my house right now. You know why we are dredging my pond that has not been dredged since it was probably created one hundred years ago, or maybe one hundred and fifty years ago.

Will you save me some muck in the bottom.

I will save you the much? How much do you want to? You know?

Bushel bushel on a pack. Okay, so what the cover, how the cover was made was that I held the camellia blossoms from January, I think until possibly as late as April, rotting away in the studio in this beautiful pile of muck, and they's really transformed into something new. So what you're seeing here on the cover is what you see again on the end papers in a previous stage.

Did you grow the camellias? No, unfortunately, I have a lot of camellias growing, and I got I was so worried. Do you get your camelias from Nuccio's in Pasadena?

I have, but mostly our market is pulling them from growers some North Carolina and Georgia.

Really, oh oh, those are the outside ones that Okay, the perennial is I love camelias and I didn't know that this is what happens to them in muck. Now that I have all this muck, maybe I'll try some of your details.

Well, I think I wanted to go to the primordial, you know, and I wanted to connect these things that are so of this moment and fleeting with something kind of forever and ancient and that type kind of cycle of life and death, and have that be like instantly clear that that's what you were entering when you photo grabbed your book. Some of the images are from various fashion shows, so there's a range of photographers and an archived work. But I have an amazing photographer, Julianne Nash,

Well, I loved reading who is Nancy Haas? I think I know her.

Yeah, she writes for the Time, so quite a bit a lot of design writing.

Okay, she's so great. Yeah, and her forward is or her introduction is really spot on. I think about your work, And she said, for all the cacophony of Thompson's metier, there's one thing that she doesn't have, however, time, and that's what distinguishes her art from most other sorts of sculpture that has to be executed very very fast, because your plant material is so fragile. Yes, and you collect it and then you put it out for a fashion show or for an art exhibit or for a bar.

It is a magical material.

Oh my gosh, I grow a lot OFAs. I now have every color of China's growing and it is just one of my favorite. Oh there it is.

It's so hard to find some of the more unusual colors nowadays, and the and they have that where they really flower like abundantly one year and then the next year it's all leafed out. So we we some years have just this paucity with no pink, no green, and you just end up with this flat burgundy. Not my favorite, but still I.

Have the churchreuse green, and I have the burgundy, but I have the rose colored. I have all the colors and pale pale pink. But in Maine, because my house is so big up there and I have huge containers, I go around the island around Mountainserve Island, and there's lots oftina's growing there, really and I and I knock on a door if they have a beautiful tree out and I said, can I trade you something for your cotinas? Oftentimes they'll say yes' because I'll do the pruning. I'll

Yes, we do.

We do.

There's a lot of that kind of personal relationships that end up getting you to a place with much more special materials. If you're not that kind of florist or artist, you're not going to make anything. You're never going to get the treasures. And so it's these like fifteen years of cultivating these amazing guys in the market for one thing, which is a huge resource to New York Flower.

And they appreciate your craziness, don't they.

Absolutely it entertains them.

Yeah, do they call you and say I have something?

Every once in a while I get the call. And I've also I've struggled too, because the branch guys, they really need everything to fit in the truck, and I'm always like, can I have the contorted, wind swept ancient thing? And they say, well, first of all that's expensive, and second of all, you're ruining my load in my truck, so you're gonna have to pay for like half that truckload for the one stupid branch you want. So anyway, it's a struggle, but it's a very joyous chase.

Are you trying to express in your creations?

I mean, I think for me, the muse is always the materials, So to drive people to see these treasures the way I see them, just to find that kind of extraordinary, exquisite, infinite experience of nature. So that's the general general thing, because as we all know, this is the destruction of planet human existence. So there's that always there, floating around in there and then but I also think there's something where I want people to understand them as

So your book is divided into sections, thickets, cascades, heaps, vapor, birds and beasts, gusts and gales. What connects and differentiates all these different segments.

Well, I think that as we were developing the book, that these are some themes that really run through a lot of work, and a lot of times these themes are combined, so I think a lot of them connect easily. You'll see one heap that also dissipates into mist. And I think that they all kind of describe materials on mass and how they change, how they lie on the ground, how they lift up from the ground. And I think those themes are always present somehow.

So you look at this book and in the luckily in the back of the book a couple pages of small photographs identifying the plant material in each of the large photos, which is good because because I had no idea that that would look like that.

But yeah, I felt like it was kind of unfair to not share the material names.

No, I love that you did. But every chapter is named thickets or missed or I love, I love all of this, and you just is that white pine.

It's white pine. And some of these heirloom chrysanthemums that have I think the I don't know what amount of pressure I have been putting on all the growers that I ever connect with. But the chrysanthemums are having a real renaissance right now, and it's just such an exquisite flower that for us. The football ones that I'm sure you think you know, remembering like prom in all decades, they're banned from import.

I know you can't get them to grow them.

I did get contraband one.

You have to do tissue culture and you have to grow them. And where are those from?

This is the cred Light Farm, which is a Catskills farm. They're really fantastic growers. I mean you'll find that in my way into the materials and into our compositions is often like a repetition, just a repetition finding a way to jump from like one color into the same color in another form, or the same form in another color. So there's a lot of that kind of pairing.

Well, you started as a sculptor before you began your work in flowers, which in your book you use the word florist tree a lot. I had never used that word florest tree. So is that the art of working with flowers? Yeah, it's like I think it's kind of like forest.

Try right.

So it's in the dictionary florest tree, I hope. So, I don't know. I haven't looked it up, but it's I've never used that word before, and I thought, I think it's such a nice descriptive word for flower people. Yeah, and don't expect to get a tight little bouquet of white roses from our guests. You're going to get she brought me something very beautiful today. I'll put it in front of the camera. So this is mimosa and poppies. That's the poppy pods. These are the leaves of the mimosa,

Yeah, sure, a gift, but something that just is screaming of what's best of the season. Church.

I know it goes with my sweater.

I'm so happy in furry like this.

It's so perfect. I love it. So let's talk about the New York City flower market. What's your typical routine. This is on twenty eighth Street between seventh and sixth and a little bit over towards Fifth and Broadway, right, Yeah, and I've been going there for many, many, many years. It does change. There seem to be fewer shops now than there used to be, but it's still very fascinating. It is.

If anybody go, Yes, everyone is welcome, and you can you can probably get something with cash if you're aggressive enough. You have to tolerate being ignored and climb over all the various florists who don't want you there. Yeah, but no, everybody's welcome. It's a bunch of wholesalers whose doors are open to the public.

This is where the florists of New York City and the surrounding areas get their flowers. Yes, they're flown in from all over the world.

But also one of the things that's really spectacular and special about our market is that some of our branch suppliers have farms all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, so we can follow the earliest forced branches that they cut in December of the quints.

They're like down at North Carolina exactly.

They cut their quints after it's had maybe two frosts and their buds are started to develop, so then they force that in barns. But as the season warms, they follow the branches from south to north, all the way up into Canada, and the scale of those materials is really enormous. So for florists like me who want everything to be massive, then that's an enormous tool and also of a local, seasonal exquisite quality. So that's really not common in flower markets over the world.

Sometimes maybe in San Francisco I saw stuff like that.

They have some good stuff, but not as much, not as much, and they don't have the cold winters, so they don't get the.

Great high dranges I remember in San Francisco. But New York is it's so and it's so I love all the people who work there too. But a Foliage Garden is one that I love, and I love fantastic and I used to get my beautiful gates there, the folding gates which are like accordion gates made out of willow. And you can also buy plants there, which I do. I when I when I'm looking for something weird, I'll go and look there for a weird orchid. Oh, they have fabulous succulents.

Yeah, and you mentioned Foliage Garden. She has these incredible greenhouses where she grows plants to oversize, so we get to see all these incredible tropicals, and she's an incredible eye the people too. It's a huge resource for us because when we have to make something crazy, we have this huge teams of people with all kinds of weird skills that can come and join us, so we don't have to figure it all out ourselves. For example, we

Oh, you should come up. We're cutting down about a ten acre parcel right now because we've had the ash disease. So we have monster ash trees lying on the ground.

Now.

My guys are My guys are cutting them to the ground, and then we're going to do our grinding thing and we grind into composts and we mix it with the horse manure and the donkey manure and the chicken manure, and in three years we have black gold best soil. But it's hard to keep up with the dying trees. We now have a beach problem. Beach trees. You're gonna have some really beautiful skeleton beach trees, you know that.

Yes, I mean that's so awful, But you're going to find a way.

You're going to have to use some of those in some of your decks.

A friend of mine is cutting down his larch and larch we got asked to do a project at Chelsea flower shows, so his dead larch is somehow going to find its way the Chelsea.

Over to England.

Yeah, he's there, So it's going to come from not too far away. And there's this memory I have of a constant Spry arrangement. She's this very famous early twentieth century.

She is our model arranger, and you mentioned her a lot in the book.

And she's extraordinarily creative. The work that she did was so groundbreaking, but each material she would select and use in its own way, and I think that's one of the ways I really follow her. But the larch stuck in my mind?

Is that going to be? Is that going to be one of your like the focal point of your.

I don't don't know yet, but I can't help but want it to be.

So when do you start setting up Chelsea?

That's in May and we have a very quick turnaround, and of course I'm a stranger to that landscape, and I have to really, I have to really do a lot of preliminary Yeah, what.

Is your goal there? They ask you to do.

There are a few florists who are doing like just a display. It's not for judging. It's not as vast does the garden displays. But there are going to be three of us, a couple of other really interesting florists and I not finalized, so I can't say any names, but they were each going to make something in this one marquee that should be very strange and interesting. Each of us has a very different approach and none of us are traditional by any means, so it should be cool.

Look at this project. There's one picture here, what was that?

That was an Ula Johnson that was at the Brooklyn Museum. That was her fashion show for We did it in fall. You can see it's all full of for samples.

Rys anthems lying just the flowers lying on the floor in many, many, many colors. Yeah, the models walked in between all these things. They're not in water or anything, so that is again ephemeral, but it's so beautiful.

The best part of this was the thing we had to kind of do at the last minute. It's not featured in these you can see them a little bit. Is these queen limes inias? Yeah, those are the thing that are the two tones, so they take you can jump from one color to another and they give you this transitional, exquisite kind of color. We also had these incredible carnations in here that are like the color of a bruise and they're so.

So it's not just chrysanthemums, it's also it's a.

Lot of stuff. There's a lot of coxcomb. It felt really coral like, but also we're really trying to mimic the kind of growth of light.

Alosha and coxcomb. I hated years ago, and now I love.

I've really come around.

So I went to Europe and I got brought home a whole lot of different seeds because mixed with other things, it looks so beautiful.

Their colors are like nothing. Yeah, those oranges and peaches, and then the acidy greens and the black black. Yeah, their exquisite.

You get many ideas out of this book. So when you create work for fashion shows such as Jason Wu who's very avant garde and Ula Johnson, which comes first? Does the fashion inspire the project? Do you get to see the fashion first or do they tell you what they want?

There's a lot of back and forth. A lot of the time, there's kind of a somebody who's been developing some kind of vague mood boardy kind of plan, a creative director, show designer, and then we come in and we try to push them to our whims and to some great successes and sometimes we follow more where they need us to go. It really depends on the client and the and the moment.

So when you go to India to do a job, how many people go with you?

Well, I went a number of times in the planning and preparing and researching. It was a really incredible client who wanted to really wanted to show her community of you know, people who throw lavish weddings a really different way. So one of the biggest challenges is that we chose to source the flowers in India, which flowers in India are grown for a lot of purposes and huge quantities, but they're not grown for the purposes of weddings and events. So often their quality isn't a purpose.

Mostly chrysanthemums and colndulism.

A lot of roses actually, but the for the fragrance and just for the heads, and people don't cut the flowers with long stems. They're used for the heads and strong or so. Sourcing was extremely difficult. The supply chain just isn't there for the things that we were looking for. Plants come on a truck, but the truck it takes three weeks. While the truck the plants sit by in a dark truck in what kind of circumstances, and also planted in clay, so every plant that you think is

How many people came to the wedding? How many guess?

I think? Oh, I think they had about eight hundred. It was amazing because we were basically making like six fashion shows at once of totally different character and different parts of the experience. Any of those in the books, they're not in the book. You can see a few of them on either our Instagram or our website. People walked through a tunnel that we entirely created. That was a forest, like a psychedelic forest that had been the driveway.

Anything oh in India.

Oh really, or even on your own domemestic property. You have to be extremely strategic and careful and knowledgeable about how to do that?

Wow, Well, yeah, you got it.

I got it, I got it. I've always find a way.

What are your favorite plants to use in your work?

You'll see a lot of them over and over again in the book. But I think I go for things with really dramatic sculptural form. We were talking about this Calanchoe leaves that I come to again and again. They have exquisite curves and leaf forms that to me, they come right off of a classical ornament, and so they're instantly evoking something kind of formal, and I think that's incredibly interesting.

And they're also easy to use, absolutely because you're just break them off the break them off the branch. They break a snap. I love them.

We use them over and over too. Yeah, we don't get to recycle a lot of our flowers. Usually it's just the compost pit.

The book's quite large. It has how many pages? Two hundred and fifty pages about and page after page after page of amazing ideas and amazing material choices. So what big jobs do you have coming up? Talk about any of them?

Well, we are doing a couple of things for fashion Week. Not massive, but interesting, I think, and it's kind of like I keep all of these pet ideas in my pocket and I wait for the right unsuspecting client and then then we have these kind of crazy plans that nobody's ever seen. So we're going to be doing a couple of those things this coming February.

It's coming up. Yeah.

We just came off of a crazy year where we did a wedding in India and then among many other projects, then we were invited to be part of this public art festival, this Flower Public Art Festival Cordova, Spain, and it's about the seventh year I believe that we participated and their five people were invited and we were asked to design at the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Cordeva, which I guess one of the most beautiful white Earth. And we chose to do these designs on the facade

See I have that growing and main it's so beautiful.

They're so stinky, Yeah, they are that.

They are so beautiful.

I think that that combination of something painful and something exquisite is often paired in my interests, the sort of repulsion and I think a lot of obviously there's always seduction, there's always seduction in designing with flowers, but to have that pushing back a little bit, a little bit of fear, some snakes.

Something you see a container rarely things are mounded on the ground. There are containers holed holding these things, but they seem to be almost floating, many of them, which are so beautiful. For Scythia another common common shrub, but you use it so beautifully.

It's a much loathed I think, uh plant because we are desperate for something and it's the first thing, so we take what we can get. But the wonderful thing about Forcythia is it's so flexible, and so you can create these kind of wonderful whips and you can really change like a willow. Yeah that's also has willow, but for Cythia also has beautiful leaves in the fall. So as a straw, it's quite elegant.

I just planted a whole row. Somebody gave me some mature for Ccythia bushes. I just planted a whole, big, long row of it, because why not. Yeah, you know, there's there's I have so much space. It's nice to have that. And then I was thinking, I guess I was thinking, like Emily Tompson, maybe I'll do something with it.

I don't know.

So your challenges are great. You have you do have to have a big truck or a couple of trucks right for all this stuff, and then do you have to take do you have to disassemble everything the minute job is over?

Yes?

Usually yes, yeah, yeah.

But you know a lot of people think that's such a painful thing about this job, but I disagree entirely, because we just get to build it all over again, and all of our work this ephemerality, like we don't have to keep living with it. You can make something and then you walk away, and that there's something really freeing and I think psychologically powerful about that experience is that it's this creation, creation, creation, and then it's all just falls into a heap of compost and rebuilds.

Yeah, how do you live with plant material in your own house?

I am a collector, are It's true? And I have a very very new garden that is incredibly exciting. Where's that Just a little brownstone in crownd Heights, Brooklyn?

Oh really? Yeah?

So we have a little tiny garden and I'm bringing in a tree. I'm trying to get the biggest tree I can get, get it root, prune so I can fit it through the door. And there's insane amount of bulbs that I endlessly go crazy for. And then the rest is sort of just experiments.

In Bedford, all the road sides are very messy. I don't know have you been driven around Bedford ever. I have about a mile of road frontage onto two roads. And this year I decided I'm clearing. I don't want any I don't want any thickets. I called a supplier, a bulb supplier that I use all the time, and at the end, like this is in January cold, and I said, do you have any leftover bulbs because nobody's going to be planting with this zero temperatures. And I

Like a piece of public art.

It is, it is, so I can't wait. We're doing it next week. The gift I only thought of that brider to your book, really, yeah, because I know, really you're so inspirational with all these massive, massive projects that you're doing amongst your contemporaries in the floral design world. Who are the people that you collaborate with or draw inspiration from.

One thing that's happened that's kind of extraordinary is that so many of the people that have come through my door and trained with me have gone on to open their own businesses, and some of them are doing just such amazing work. And they are just like my children, my nieces. They're not a lot of nephews, but mostly nieces.

I've seen He's.

A great friend. He came to India with us and he's really quite an artist. And there's other friends in Singapore. It's starting to be a whole web of us.

Oh, here's one of my favorite rooms of pool room at the Four Seasons. I remember when you did all these when they first started after Carbone took over. Right, Wow, that.

Was one of my favorite projects. Oh, I bet we really developed all these designs over time as they as they opened. They reopened the old Four Seasons and everything's landmarked. It's the only landmarked interiors in New York, and so there's only so many things they can change. And the flowers are the thing. But we did build this thing in the pool for a long period of time. I don't know if you ever got to see which we did that, but I always thought it was like Philip

Of the room. There's a photo in the book of a bunch of ladders, old wooden painters ladders and then vines. Is that what kind of vine is? Vine? And wasps nests Yeah.

This was a fashion show for an accessories company called brother Belly's. My friend Aura helped conceive this and they released butterflies into the design. Oh my gosh, you can see them in.

So what are the tools that you use that you have in your bag?

At is my ars? Clippers? I just love those they are They're so good for cutting branches actually for a small tool. I have secatary secuataries, I have knives, I have wirecutters, I have but for the most part, florest tools are what they can wear on their belt. We work with like spit and vinegar.

You know.

It's It's one of the things I love about this work is it's so weirdly creative in the problem solving realm. You have to fix crazy problems with nothing. You have a piece of tape and you have to solve the whole of thing falling over before the guest arrives and under ridiculous time circumstances and off and out in the

I don't know. I've been watching the evolution of floral design for a long long time in New York, and you really did change it. I mean you changed a lot and made it, I think more interesting, because it's great if you can use a million flowers, you know, spend it on strings from the ceiling and you know, and but it's different. You'rs is different. And I love the incorporation of trees and branches and weeds and all kinds of material that you would never ever expect to see indoors any place.

Well, I think I wanted to feel real. Some part of this fantasy that we make is still always, always, at least almost all of it is real. We don't work with artifice. The artifice isn't all in the transformation of the context and like bring it into a weird place.

So there's there's a place in la that I go to every time I tropics ink you go to the tropics.

Yeah, amazing, as you loved it.

There. Ryan, He's one of my favorite Ryans in the whole world. Do you get stuff from him?

I mean, it's too difficult to get it here from there and those crazy baobab looking things, but they've really set a tone. People are really paying attention. I'm so thrilled because it's like people are understanding this kind of Jurassic esthetic, getting away from really boring commercial stuff.

Yeah, but he's He taught me how to take care of my staghorns because I inherited some really amazing staghorns that are like a hundred years old, so I have to learn how. He says, throw a banana in for it to eat.

Really, Yeah, do you have to hose them off every day?

And no, every day I water my staghorns because they like they like water.

Yeah, it's not a good interior plant, no, for just exactly.

And I have giant hanging ones now that I started myself, and I hang them outside in the summer. But I finally found a place in a greenhouse where I could hang them.

There's a grower in Hawaii that I actually visited once. He was quite a character. He had wild boars that he was actually penned. He'd rescued them as babies, and when we got there they got out. Oh my god, I swear I had nothing to do.

What were they eating?

Everything? They everything? He had the most, This absolute cacophony of a greenhouse with just incredible treasure is just buried in it, but wild because it's just him taking care of everything. She had a xanadu philodendron that was acid green, that is so rare. And he sends me the cut leaves for a fortune, like seven dollars a leave.

Have you been at the Amazon spheres in Seattle?

No, Oh, you have to go there.

Oh, don't forget to go there because they also have amazing greenhouses with very rare plants. And you would not think Amazon would have such a place, but they do very rare, exciting things, and their walls of plants are very beautiful. They're living walls.

I have to go.

Yeah, very extraordinary. Well, it's so much fun to talk to you. I want to I want to see everything you do. Tell me when you're doing something in New York that I can to come and take a peek at.

Fantastic.

Please come visit with us again, and good luck in Chelsea. I can't wait to see that and all the other things that Emily Thompson creates for herself and for her clients.

Thank you so much, and thank you for everything you've done to lay the groundwork for what I do, because it's it's been very part to me.

Oh I'm nice.

Thank you.

You can follow her at Emily Thompson Flowers. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And Emily's new book is available now for pre order on www dot fiden dot com that's p h A I D O N and on April ninth, wherever books are sold.