They are the scourge of festival season, the punchline to all summer cliches and the most polarising accessory since the Peaky Blinders flat-cap. Yet if the rumours are true, the Princess of Wales plans to attend Saturday’s coronation wearing a floral headpiece instead of the traditional tiara.
While it’s unlikely that the princess will spend the duration of Saturday’s two-hour ceremony dressed like she’s ready for Coachella, you can see how the gossip started. A flower crown would align with everything King Charles stands for, being an advocate of organic farming, a keen gardener and an outspoken critic of industrial agribusiness. His hand-painted ceremony invitations featured wild strawberries, lilies of the valley, rosemary, and the Green Man, an ancient folklore figure who symbolises rebirth and spring.
It’s also, according to the Telegraph, an attempt to make the royal family seem more “in touch”. On the other hand, to quote the musician and former flower crown wearer Courtney Love back in 2014: “Flower crowns are over.”
Love wore a flower crown on the cover of Details magazine in 1986, and regularly performed in one during her career. Before that, they appeared in ancient Greek ceremonies and traditional folk dress in Ukraine (there known as vinok). Even Queen Victoria wore an orange blossom version to her own wedding. Briefly banned during medieval times (they were associated with Paganism) they experienced a particularly vigorous resurgence during the 1960s.
More recently, flower crowns have been seen on the heads of artists such as Taylor Swift while performing at music festivals in the 00s, where floral headgear became an almost mandatory uniform alongside crop-tops, jean shorts, and small round sunglasses. Carrie Johnson even wore one to her wedding to the former prime minister Boris Johnson.
If the future queen is to wear one, we can probably expect another resurgence. Whatever she wears has a huge impact – last year, the princess was reportedly worth £1bn to the fashion industry.
On that note, the main question is what type of flower should she wear – and how to maintain them. Former florist Christine Wilkinson suggests spray roses. See also freesias, craspedia and lisianthus, which can bloom as early as May. Best avoided is lily of the valley, last seen in the scandalous crown worn by Princes Charlotte as Meghan’s bridesmaid in 2018, and which if ingested can cause discomfort, as outlined in Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare.
Mairead Curtin of Rebel Rebel flowers, the team who made Beyoncé’s flower crown on the cover of Vogue in 2018, suggests constructing “something light and comfortable … a banging headache for the coronation wouldn’t be ideal”.
“If she wants to go fresh, roses are great because they are fairly robust.” Still, Curtin adds, the weather has been unreliable so there might be an issue obtaining some of May’s usual offerings. Curtin also suggests carnations and hellebores for their “fabulous rich colours”. If the theme is red, white and blue, the latter can be achieved using “tiny scilla heads wired into your crown, or the heads of delphinium spires”.
The real problem would be keeping the thing fresh for the two-hour ceremony. “The flowers would need to well conditioned prior to making it and sprayed with water up until the time [they] are worn,” says Wilkinson. Good job it’s probably going to rain, then.
