Pick the right mix to create the best dried flowers
Remember to sow for scent
Inspired by the old tradition at Baddesley Clinton of masking unpleasant odours by strewing the wooden floors and hanging the beams with a colourful pot-pourri of fragrant herbs and scented flowers, Miss Simpson always includes many fragrant plants in her mix. Together with sweet marjoram, Oregano majorana, whose scent is intensified by drying, she adds the heavily perfumed perennial lavender, Lavandula angustifolia, which grows elsewhere in the garden.
Choose the right colours
Colour and colour retention are key qualities that Miss Simpson looks for in the flowers. This year, she’s grown a traditional, tried-and-tested dolly mixture of bright-hued everlasting flowers, including Helichrysum bracteatum, which flowers profusely if continuously cut from July until the first frosts. Also included in the display is a pastel mix of statice, Limonium sinuatum, and a mix of larkspur in pinks, blues and white. White adds brightness, bringing out the colour lost through drying.
Include standout specimens
Brilliant single heads in rich golds and oranges add bright and warm highlights. At Baddesley Clinton, hundreds of easyto-grow, orange safflowers, Carthamus tinctorius, were grown from seed that was sown successionally in situ, in order to stagger flowering. Their showy tufted heads dry easily and keep eitheir vivid hues.
Another good plant to try growing from seed is Helianthus annuus Soraya, whose branching stems produce large (although not huge), golden, saucer-sized sunflowers. ‘The multi-headed, smaller sunflowers produce more blooms than the singlestem varieties, whose heads are often too large and unwieldly for arrangements,’ explains Miss Simpson.
Pack in the flowerheads
Plants with branching habits also ensure a good density of flowers per square foot, which is essential when growing thousands of blooms on limited land. Certain varieties of love-lies-bleeding, Amaranthus caudatus, make really large plants, dangling with scores of chenille, caterpillar-like flowers in red or green. These must be picked early to avoid losing colour.
Similar in form are the dangling twists of Russian statice, Psylliostachys suworowii, also known as pink pokers. These easyto-grow, vivid-pink spirals bloom furiously over a prolonged period, dry really easily and readily retain their brilliance.