Stockbridge Floral Design
04 Friday Jul 2025
Written by Debra Prinzing in American Flowers Week 2025, Botanical Couture, Floral Design, News & Events, Resources for Farmers & Florists
Student Life in Flowers, with farmer-florists of the future
Professor Sarah Berquist teaches farmer-florists of the future through the sustainable flower farming and floral entrepreneurship curriculum at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts.
During spring semester, she challenged her Farmer-Florist Practicum students to join Slow Flowers’ American Flowers Week campaign with their own botanical couture designs. For many, this was their first foray into wearable florals, and like most of the projects Berquist assigns, the young floral artists and growers fearlessly embraced the opportunity to creatively experiment with local and seasonal blooms.
“The practicum is an advanced version of our retail floral design course,” Berquist explained. “We did a series of projects during spring semester – from working in the greenhouse and holding plant and tuber sales, to producing an annotated bibliography of Slow Flowers articles. When I proposed the botanical couture project, the students dove right in.”
With “Student Life” as their prompt, class members brainstormed design themes around familiar university, agriculture, and farmer-floristry themes.
“There’s something magical about the collective energy of this program,”
Sarah Berquist, Instructor, Stockbridge Floral Design
Four design concepts emerged: The Shirt, The Boots, The Backpack, and The Graduates. “Everyone liked the symbolism of education and creativity,” said Allison Virzi, a graduating senior and teaching assistant in the program. Added Sarah Johnson, “We had so much going on at the end of the semester. We were growing for plant sales and we were also making bouquets for markets. We kept asking ourselves, ‘how are we going to be able to do this?’ But, we obviously found the time and it was definitely worth the experience!”
Here’s more about each look, along with comments from the student-creators:
The Shirt
During the student brainstorming session, Aeryn Willingham was doing what she often does: working on a knitting project. Then she heard Berquist suggest using spring tulips grown by the class, adding, “maybe Aeryn could knit something for it.”
“My brain started going a mile a minute, because I love fiber crafts – I’ve been knitting since I was three and spinning since I was ten,” said Willingham, a food and farming major. She created a hyper-local knit tunic into which her classmates inserted a riot of tulips and ranunculus. “I bought a pound of fibers from a nearby spinnery and spun my own skeins,” Willingham explained. There is a lacy openness to the soft, knitted garment, the gauge of which emulates chicken wire mesh. “I did a little work to figure out the best diameter of openings to accommodate tulip and ranunculus stems and I just made up the pattern as I went.”
With Willingham serving as the garment’s model, several of her classmates added tulips to the knit bodice. They devised an ombre effect with darker orange flowers blending into yellow ones, working from the base of the top to the neckline and shoulders. Reflexed tulip petals add to the look’s ruffled appearance, echoing the flared sleeve design.
“I enjoyed combining slow fashion with Slow Flowers,” Willingham added. “This is a handmade shirt from local wool that I’ll wear again and again. It can be worn for years to come,” she said. The flowers had an afterlife, as well, Berquist noted. “We reused a lot of these tulips a couple days later for bud vases at a commencement event. So we were really leaning into sustainable floristry!”
The Boots
Two pairs of iconic farming boots symbolize the life of a farmer-florist, and the footwear was transformed with spring flowering bulbs, a beautiful embellishment that transformed functional footwear into wearable art.
Melanie Morgan and Charlotte Bayer served as designers and models for this charming agriculture-inspired floral vignette. Staples of many farmers’ closets, the leather Blundstones and Hunter rain boots owned by these students inspired them to use the boots’ openings as floral vessels.
Specialty daffodils and tulips, plus ranunculus and lily of the valley stems, emerge as if growing from inside the boots, playfully dancing around the models’ ankles. The addition of a shovel as a prop brings vibes of the painting ‘American Gothic,’ reimagined as a joyful (rather than dour) scene. “It’s cool that this photo shoot happened inches away from our plot where many of these flowers are grown,” Berquist said.
The Backpack
Susan Nadeau chose the ubiquitous Jansport backpack to symbolize the student lifestyle. “At first, she was going to fill it with a bouquet of flowers, but then decided to design directly onto the outside surface,” Berquist explained. “She used cable ties to attach a ‘tube’ of chicken wire to the backpack; then inserted flowers into that base.” As both designer and model, she embraced the joy of a “just-about-to-be-free” senior by giving her reliable accessory its own floral tattoo.
The Graduates
Sarah Johnson and Allison Virzi partnered to “flower” their traditional cap-and-gown graduation attire. “The photo shoot happened during graduation week, and this project symbolized how close we all became as the Stockbridge Floral Design team,” Virzi said. “We decided to make tulip stoles and daffodil tassels with the flowers we were harvesting that week.”
Graduation stoles are often decorated with symbols, colors, or text that represent the student’s academic achievements or honors, so it’s fitting that the farmer-florists chose from their crops to design floral stoles. Ruby DiGregorio created the tassels by threading several daffodil varieties, attaching to the mortarboard caps. The construction of the stoles required two different mechanics. Virzi assembled her stole with a strand of tulips (complete with bulbs), attached to a long tube of chicken wire that draped around her neck. “It has so much movement because of the drapey quality of the foliage,” she said.
Johnson’s stole features daffodils threaded onto a wire base. “We wanted to play with the mono-floral concept,” she said. “We had so many varieties of daffodils that when we started stringing them together, they looked really cool.”
Berquist stepped out of the way in order to encourage student teams to explore their ideas and assume leadership for designing and producing, modeling, and handling photography. “There’s something magical about the collective energy of this program,” Berquist said. “We could have just come up with one botanical couture scene, but there were so many ideas and these students embraced the creative opportunity as they metabolized their learnings. As the instructor, I can corral people and get the materials there in one spot, but once that was done, it was amazing what happened next!”
STUDENT PARTICIPANTS:
Aeryn Willingham @elizabethaeryn
Allison Virzi @stemandshellfloral
Charlotte Bayer @char.bayer
Melanie Morgan @mmelrm_
Sarah Johnson @sarah.olivia316
Susan Nadeau @susanamarie
Ruby DiGregorio @basilsprigg
DETAILS:
Stockbridge Floral Design is part of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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