Poppy Tiaras
One of August's birth month flowers is the poppy. I knew about one poppy tiara out there but I wondered if there were more. And there are!
The one I already knew about is Queen Margrethe's Golden Poppies Tiara. She personally commissioned this from Danish jewelry designer Arje Griegst in 1976. Margrethe is an incredibly inventive, artistic and talented person and I think this is a perfect tiara for her. It gets a lot of hate on royal forums and blogs, but I like it!
The 8 poppies, which are detachable, are made of 21 karat gold which has been hammered into thin plates. Each poppy is attached with twisted wire to a haircomb frame from which several leaf-shaped drops (maybe of amber?) dangle. If you go to the source link, there are a lot of pictures of Margrethe wearing the tiara and you can see how she's arranged the flowers around her head.
In addition to golden poppy flowers, the tiara also has aquamarine, moonstone and carved opal, some in the form of insects, some decorating the poppy stamens. If you look closely at the photo (you can click to embiggen it), you can see a rather large spider friend crawling up the second from the left poppy stem. You can also see several bees crawling on the poppy blooms. The tiara comes with matching earrings.
Margrethe has another golden flower tiara that I am pretty sure has some poppies on it although I can't find anything that comes right out and says that.
This is the Naasut Tiara, a gift from the people of Greenland to commemorate Margrethe's Golden Jubilee in 2012. The flowers are representative of ones that grow in Greenland and, in fact, "naasut" is Kalaallisut (the Greenlandic language) for "flowers." Danish goldsmith Nicolai Appel used coins minted from gold that came from a Greenland mine to create it. The tiara is convertible and breaks down into brooches and hairpins. There is also a set of matching earrings.
This might look golden but it is made out of brass. Created by jeweler Christopher Thompson Royds in 2022, it is for sale on the Sotheby's site but the price is only listed as "available upon request." I find that usually means "too expensive for me." If you do happen to have that kind of money, though, on his website (linked below) he says that he enjoys the "bespoke process" so if you have a tiara vision, he would be down to creating it with you.
I found this pretty little circlet of poppies on Pinterest and tracked it down to a now-defunct site which specialized in silver bridal tiaras, Silver Tiaras (archive link).
This is the last poppy tiara I was able to track down and I wish there was a better picture of it! It looks like it was really something. You can click on it to embiggen it if you want a closer look. This is Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna and her tiara is made of poppy seed heads. Interesting artistic choice to use the seed head and not the bloom. This image is from a Tumblr post and the author commented:
The thing she had in her hair reminds me in some way, Queen Margrethe II´s awful golden poppies.
See, I told you Margrethe's golden poppies got a lot of hate!
I am kind of surprised that I found no coral poppy tiaras. Poppies come in all the colors but red is the first color that comes to my mind when I think of poppies. Coral would have been the perfect color material to work with.
- Griegst - maker of Queen Margrethe's Golden Poppies site
- Nicolai Appel - maker of the Naasut Tiara
- Christopher Thompson Royds - English jeweler, designer of the brass poppy tiara
- Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna - Wikipedia entry
- Maria Pavlovna: history and jewels of a grand duchess - this blog post is free to read once you sign up (you could probably use a throwaway email address) but it's delightfully chatty and has some interesting tidbits.
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