One of my favorite summer activities as a kid was making flower crowns out of wild flowers. I would pick daisies and sweet peas that grew in the apple orchard behind the barn, and braid them together into long chains, which I fastened into wreaths with a piece of grape-tying wire from the barn. The barn was fascinating too – old millstones, dusty steamer trunks from when my grandparents came to America, rusty tools, and always the aroma of homemade wine, discreetly stored in gallon jugs behind the workbench.

I made flower wreaths for my girls when they were small, and now flower crowns are a popular kids’ birthday party activity. It’s easy to do, especially if you have floral tape and wire, but it can also be done by simply braiding the stems of flowers together, and then attaching the two ends to each other to form a flower crown.

It’s a great activity for kids to do for themselves, if they’re over the age of 8, and they only need to know how to make a braid. Boys are not left out either: you can make laurel leaf crowns or wreaths of green foliage, and everyone can feel like a flower child.

How the braiding works:

If you want to make more elaborate flower crowns, you need floral wire and tape. Simply attach the flowers to the wire by wrapping them together with the tape, adding flowers and wrapping continually until you have enough flowers to make the size crown that you want.

Another method is to cut the stems from the flowers and use thin floral wire or thick thread to poke through the base of the flower, stringing the blossoms together like leaves. This gives you nice, flat flowers resting directly against the head.

For the laurel wreath, so fetchingly worn by little Teddy, you need a needle and thread, and the leaves are basted together to form a wreath. This is a little beyond the point at which I’m willing to go with a craft (mostly because I’m impatient,) but that too turned out to be fairly easy if you’re only making one or two.