How to transform flowers into precious jewellery

Times

09-05-2025

Spring comes in with a burst of flowers, but flowers are fragile and ephemeral. Floral jewellery is a way to hold back time and flowers have accompanied us through the turmoils of love and even in death. After Queen Meda, the sixth wife of Philip II of Macedonia, threw herself onto his funeral pyre, she was buried with an intricate wreath of gold myrtle flowers, symbolising the victory of love over death.
Enamelled flowers decorated the backs of 17th-century jewels and watch cases but floral jewellery really blossomed in the 18th century with the whimsical rococo art of Fragonard and Boucher, at a time when silk court dresses were covered in colourful flowers. Little baskets of jewelled flowers were turned into giardinetti, or little garden rings, known in English as 'flowerpot rings'. Grander customers sought whole jewelled bouquets. The French queen Marie Antoinette, never one to be behind the fashion, ordered a diamond bouquet of wild roses and hawthorn blossoms from the court jeweller Bapst. The new supply of diamonds from the mines in South Africa in the mid-19th century allowed women to commission extravagant jewelled corsages, sometimes set with en tremblant springs to allow the jewelled flowers to tremble as if in a summer breeze.
From the early 19th century, every flower was given a meaning, listed in helpful dictionaries. Daisies symbolised affection, a fact known to every hopeful lover who has tried plucking the petals to reveal their romantic fate. Jewelled daisies play on this old idea. A 1900 Maison Vever design for a jewel shows a woman with the flowing hair popular in the art nouveau period set against a panel reading 'Un peu, pas trop, passionnément, pas du tout', recording love going from the faint through to the passionate before ending with its total loss.
An enamelled ring transforms the custom of daisy plucking into a jewel. Tiny doors, enamelled with roses (for love) and daisies (for innocence), open up to reveal the hidden message, doubtless with the hope of landing on success rather than failure.
The art nouveau jeweller René Lalique had a particular appreciation for flowers, which he observed closely from the new bud to the almost decaying. The wood anemone, represented in Lalique's fragile glass, enamel and diamond pendant, signifies anticipation and expectation. It was bought by the Dutch consul to Russia from Lalique's exhibition in St Petersburg in 1903, but the consul certainly didn't expect to be caught up in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He fled with his family, taking the pendant back to a safer life in the Netherlands.
Lalique favoured the lily of the valley in particular, as a good luck token and emblem of spring. On May 1 he gave the workers at his factory the traditional bunch of lilies of the valley, accompanied by chocolates. Lilies of the valley found their way into his brooches, hair combs and pendants.
Forget-me-nots, as the name suggests, are for remembrance. A jewel decorated with a forget-me-not was an unmistakable message to a lover. Van Cleef and Arpels' mid-20th century bunch of jewelled forget-me-nots came with a little gold tag to reinforce the meaning. Flower jewellery has appealed to people in all sorts of situations. When Private AB Petch went to war in 1916, he took a little heart-shaped glass pendant painted with the flower and the words 'forget me not' as a reminder of a loved one waiting at home.
Pansies, or in French pensées, are for 'thoughts of thee', and the gift of a jewelled pansy was one way to stay in your lover's thoughts. The bright colours of variegated pansies could be recreated with enamels, amethysts and citrines, and made into brooches and necklaces as an open statement of love or friendship.
Jewels and flowers need not be in competition. Some jewellers have found ways to combine the two, perhaps by incorporating a boutonniere for a real flower into a piece of jewellery. The Sketch of April 3, 1907, illustrated floral jewellery alongside its botanical inspiration, suggesting that 'the ingenious artificer go still further and make settings into which real flowers could be placed'. The new clip earrings of 1935, according to The Northern Whig, could also be improved by the addition of flowers, real or artificial.
Colourful flowers continue to inspire designers to make jewels to brighten even the darkest season.