Quick Takes With: Emily Thompson

If Wednesday Addams were a floral designer, her arrangements would look like Emily Thompson’s: dripping, clambering, creeping, amorphous, and alive despite being very much dead. We’ve covered Emily’s inimitable installations and arrangements for more than a decade, and not once have we used the word “bouquet” (too neat, too colorful) to describe her work. Instead, we used words like “wild and witchy,” “breathtaking,” and, in a moment of extreme understatement “mundane it is not.” Her knack for turning foliage and flowers into arresting forms likely stems from her background as a sculptor and artist before “falling into the medium of flowers,” she says. 

Today, the New York City-based designer shares the garden books she returns to time and again (both are fiction!), the plant on her wish list that bears flowers resembling field mice, and the trick to long-lasting cut flowers.

Photography courtesy of Emily Thompson.

Your first garden memory:

I remember lying on the lichen-encrusted rocks of my first childhood home. Giant glacial boulders were covered in “British soldiers.” Tiny worlds for warring battalions.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia.

Instagram account that inspires you:

@indefenseofplants.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

Graphic, jurassic, idiosyncratic.

Favorite go-to plant:

Farfugium.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Rose of Sharon.

Plant that makes you swoon:

Podophylum, arisaema, trillium, erythronium, saxifrage, skunk cabbage, epimedium.

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

I thought I had a shade garden. My shade plants proceeded to fry.

Unpopular gardening opinion:

Colorful flowers are overrated.

Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

While tastes in gardens seem to have moved away from impatience borders, in cut flowers I find most people are painfully stuck in highly commercial design where the flowers look aggressively store-bought. The majestic prairies that have entered our garden lexicon should find their way to the vase.

Favorite gardening hack:

I’ll offer a cut flower tip: boil your stems. After a fresh cut, a minute in boiling water will revive and prolong the life of many (nay, most) stems.

Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

This is my job, so I like to do something understated. A sprig or a weed.

Every garden needs a…

Stone wall. I’m mad for rocks.

Favorite hardscaping material:

Rocks from my family’s mountainside home in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Tool you can’t live without:

My giant pole lopper, though sometimes I get over-zealous.

Go-to gardening outfit:

I wear whatever I had on that day and ruin it.

Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

My friends at Landcraft and Issima bring me unmatched treasures. [See our Quick Takes with Issima founder Taylor Johnston here.] I recently discovered Mount Venus Nursery in Dublin. And the soon-to-be The Field Nursery in the Cotswolds that I cannot wait to experience.

On your wishlist:

Oliver’s Arisarum proboscideum From Mount Venus Nursery.

Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

Sakonnet Garden in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

The REAL reason you garden:

A collaboration with the living world needs no explanation.