Dried Flowers

Preserving Wildflowers

Do you remember finding petals in books as a child? My grandmother and mother filled the family Bible with flowers, often roses, pressed between the vellum of these old books. What a wonderful way to capture the memories of the year.

Pressing flowers is one method of drying and preserving them. This is how it is done in preparation for storage in herbaria and museums. Not all flowers press well aesthetically. Unless of course you want to pull the flower apart before pressing in order create your own artful displays on bookmarks or other two-dimensional papers.

A second method involves even less preparation. Bouquets of similar flowers can be gathered together and tied with twine of elastic and hung in ventilated dark spaces, upside down. These keeps the stems straight and the darkness keeps them from fading too quickly. I use a closet and clothes hangars to pin the smallish bouquets.

Ornamentals ideal for drying include the globe thistle, poppy seed heads, cornflowers, statice, lavender and love-lies-bleeding. Wildflowers that dry well include yarrow, pearly everlasting, broom, flax, sea lavender, reed canarygrass, cottongrass and horsetail. Later in the fall you can add holly and winterberry with their crimson berries for a splash of bright colour.

There are many more to try. Certainly that special bouquet of roses if hung before they reach their peak can be captured and preserved. I have some 5 year old displays that are still immaculate in form.

Yarrow, photo by Martin Thomas

Pearly Everlasting, photo by Martin Thomas

Sea Lavender, photo by Martin Thomas

horsetails, photo by Jamie Ellison

Canada holly berries, photo by Ross Hall