No matter the time of year, freshly cut flowers will always bring a sense of joy and natural beauty into any room. Fresh bouquets in water - whether grown ourselves or gifted - are normally at their best for a couple of weeks, but blooms will be fleeting and are usually thrown away once they start to lose their colour and wilt. So, a question that I’m asked a lot is simply - ‘How can I make my flowers last longer?’ The answer lies in the art of drying flowers - a craft that I’ve been immersed in for the past seven years. Dried floral arrangements will bring a different aesthetic to interiors compared to fresh - they are not for everyone - but if you like the look, you can very easily prolong the beauty of your flowers by months - even years - by creating striking arrangements that celebrate floral structures and will add interest to mantelpieces, dining tables, sideboards - you name it - throughout the seasons.
Discover five simple ways you can make your flowers last longer
1. Hang them out to dry
Whilst it is wonderful to bring cut flowers into the home, it is also possible to cut and dry your garden blooms to enjoy later on in the year. Most garden flowers dry exceptionally well and generally, cutting flowers for drying means you can leave them to bloom fully in the garden before cutting (unlike with fresh where you will mostly be cutting them in bud). Cut long stems of flowers, strip the leaves off and hang out to dry in bunches of 5-10 stems. Most stems will be dry within 4-6 weeks.
2. Treasure the structure
As summer slips into autumn, you will be able to find many structural seedheads and grasses in the garden. These can be cut and placed in a wide necked vase or a selection of bud vases to bring contemporary, artistic displays to your home. Place the vase somewhere the light catches it, casting interesting shadows on the walls.
3. The gift that keeps on giving
Being gifted flowers is one of life's biggest joys and wouldn’t it be the best if we could make those flowers last a little longer? Consider deconstructing a gifted bouquet, selecting a few stems to hang out and dry and placing the rest in a vase with water. Hang the selected stems out to dry somewhere warm, damp free and out of direct sunlight. Flowers that will dry well are dahlias, roses, gypsophila, statice, peonies and delphiniums.
4. A display on its own
Whilst the majority of flowers dry best hung out to dry, there are a few that do well dried out sitting in a vase with a touch of water. These flowers can be left to dry in the vase, creating a display in themselves. Flowers that dry well standing upright are gypsophila, hydrangeas, anything in the daisy family and rudbeckia. Fill a vase full of the flowers and allow them to dry out over a few weeks.
5. Flower frames
A contemporary way to display your dried flowers is to create flower frames. Using naturally dyed linen as the backdrop, carefully stitch individual flower stems to your linen backdrop and then place a frame (with the glass removed) over the top. Create montages using lots of small frames or one large meadow inspired display.
Discover more about dried floral art with Bex via her new online course, How To Create Forever Flowers, at Create Academy (createacademy.com)
