Braided Wildflower Crown

The August garden isn’t my favorite garden. Here in Chicago, or at least in our backyard, it’s half-harvested and dry as a bone. The lush, cool-season veggies that made the June garden look healthy and hopeful are long-gone, their beds picked over like a fruit tray at the end of a long party. But by the end of summer, if I’ve played my cards right, there’s always something to celebrate. If not tomatoes, squash, cucumber, or melon, heaps of wildflowers - my favorites being cosmos, zinnias, poppies, dianthus, coreopsis, alyssum, baby’s breath, and delphinium. Once I’ve had my fill of home-picked bouquets, I like to pick flowers to braid crowns (or what I call chair wreaths now that my kids are older!). If you’d like to try making one, there are loads of tutorials online, many of which call for a frame (store-bought or homemade from wire). Personally I like to make them the old-fashioned way, by braiding the stems together. Hope you enjoy!

Materials

wildflowers

floral twine

scissors

DIRECTIONS

1. Collect a small bouquet of wildflowers, being sure to cut them low to the ground so their stems are long and easy to braid.

2. Choose six wildflowers from your bouquet and divide them into three groups of two - each group will be used to braid a crown.

3. Begin braiding the stems of the wildflowers, starting just below the blossoms. As you braid, add a new flower to the center group before crossing over it with the  outer groups. For a fuller crown, add 2-3 wildflowers at a time. If it gets hard to braid because the stems are too bushy, remove some or all of the leaves from the stems.

5. When your braid is long enough to fit around your head, stop braiding and connect the two ends of the crown by wrapping them in floral twine. Snip the loose stems and tuck the them into the braid.

6. Once you‘ve secured your crown, you can fill in the crown (and hide the twine) by threading extra flowers into the braid.