Carly Langman fines tunes a pair of bird of paradise earrings, Tucson, Ariz., June 5, 2026.
Many artists take inspiration from the beauty and nature around them, but Tucson maker, Carly Langman, doesn’t just capture the natural world in bloom, she turns garden flowers and native plants of the Sonoran desert into one-of-a-kind botanical jewelry.
“I've always been a nature lover, and I've always had ideas for things I wanted to do with nature,” Langman said.
Each one of her necklaces, earring pairs, and bracelets are made from flowers, seeds, or petals Langman hand collected and preserved in resin. Among the rainbow bouquet of florals, are petals from sunflowers, geraniums, roses, and pansies, as well as whole desert willow flowers, and palo verde blooms. She also fashions earrings from the rings of pine trees, velvet mesquite pods, yucca, and other natural materials and native plants species of Arizona.
Some of the earrings Carly Langman has made using mesquite beans, China berry seeds and sycamore buds along other organic material, part of her works through Harvested Creations, Tucson, Ariz., June 5, 2026.
“One of my passions is highlighting the native species,” she said. “So many people are divorced from nature, they don't know a screwbean mesquite pod if they tread over it in the street, so I love highlighting that kind of element in my work.”
Her most popular pieces though, Langman said, are her more recognizable flower earrings and necklaces.
“All the flashy, showy, pretty flowers, which I also love. Desert willows, the Arizona yellow bells, and then the bird of paradise are actually all really popular. Geranium is really popular as well,” she said. “My biggest customer is the Tucson Botanical Gardens, and then I also have products at Tohono Chul as well, and then a few other smaller gift shops, but the Botanical Gardens goes through a lot of the earrings and the silver necklaces.”
Langman, who said she’s always had a fascination for odd or unconventional jewelry, began working with resin and botanicals about two years ago as a way of coping with personal hardship.
“My stepmom is a very creative person. I went back to Australia and stayed with her and my dad, and she helped me through this difficult time by getting me to do a lot of crafting, and then all these ideas just started flowing,” Langman said. “We were making bangles, and then we were putting botanicals into the bangles, and both of us were just having so much fun doing that, and then I thought ‘if you can put the botanicals into resin, why can't you like put the resin on the botanical?’ because I wanted it more to be a tool.”
Carly Langman poses with several examples of bracelets she has made using seeds, berries and grasses Tucson, Ariz., June 5, 2026.
She spent hours researching resin on YouTube, watching what other makers were creating, and gathering any tips she could.
“The whole world of resin has so much to learn about. I also had to learn which flowers I can do this with, which flowers I can't do this with,” Langman said. “ I had to learn about silica gel, using that as a way to preserve the color and the shapes of the flowers, and how to put the flowers into silica gel in order to get the shape that you want.”
Some flowers, she said, pose specific challenges.
“For some reason, orange flowers, you pick them and they look fantastic, and then within two months the orange is gone. So I'm still experimenting with trying to get around that,” Langman said.
Making a single necklace or pair of earrings is an intensive process that takes Langman hours or even days, and it starts even before the flowers are harvested.
“Before I've picked a flower, I've grown that plant, I've cared for it for months, I get up early and I watch it, and I'm looking for any new flowers,” she said.
Over the years she’s gathered hundreds of flowers for her jewelry, from her own garden as well as public spaces and even the desert outside of Tucson.
“Getting the flowers, I've had to learn to be very, very creative, because I like to have a wide variety on my table,” Langman said. “We have a desert willow that provides me with all of our desert willow flowers. Our neighbors happen to have an oleander that I can see from my living room, as soon as there's a fresh flower. Then I go into the desert, and I get yucca and desert senna.”
Once the blooms have been collected, Langman dries them by pressing them flat, or placing them carefully in silica gel.
Carly Langman sprinkles silicon gel on a Mexican sunflower to dry it out quickly with as little damage as possible to the bloom, Tucson, Ariz., June 5, 2026.
“Not all flowers I treat with silica gel because silica gel can be quite rough on the flowers,” she said. “Every flower is different. There's some flowers that will be dry in one day, and then there's other flowers that will take weeks to dry.”
The dried flowers are then stored with dozens of others in clear organizing drawers in her workspace until she turns them into a finished piece of wearable floral art.
“I've got all these drawers with everything labeled as to what's in there, and I can keep things in here for quite a long time, so that when I'm ready to make the earrings, I just take whatever it is I need,” Langman said. “I have to go through large volumes of flowers, usually to find two that look the same.”
Before dipping the flowers in the resin, Langman uses toothpicks to painstakingly paint the resin on to add strength to the delicate petals, then it’s time for a final dip in resin to create a nice, smooth, and durable coating.
Carly Langman relocates the pins on a set of earrings made with bird of paradise blooms, Tucson, Ariz., June 5, 2026.
“I'll just start off putting it onto the petals, and then, and then I'll put it under the lamp petal by petal, and then build it up onto these stems until I've got pretty much a coating of resin over the whole thing,” she said. “I have to be so delicate with them, because it's soon as you dip a flower, it's like sticking a piece of tissue in water, and just pulling.”
Langman said she can sometimes make between 20 and 50 pieces a week, and just like no two flowers are perfectly identical, there's no two pieces that are exactly the same.
“There's always going to be things that are different,” she said. “I'm always trying to come up with new ideas and make new things. That's where I feel happiest.”
Carly Langman works on a pair of China berry earrings in one of the workspaces in her home, Tucson, Ariz., June 5, 2026. Langman uses flowers, seeds and grasses in creating jewelry through her business Harvested Creations.
As for what's next for Langman and her harvested creations, she said she hopes to dedicate more time to her works and would like to see her pieces in more gift shops and markets. Overall though, Langman said she wants her botanical jewelry to inspire people to find the beauty in the small things, to slow down, and connect with nature.
“That's the essence of what I'm about,” Langman said. “Trying to show people this stuff is all around you all the time, just take notice, pick it off the ground, and make something for yourself.”
