HIGH AND DRY
Dried flowers prolong the beauty of the blooms
Every gardener knows the pleasure of the season’s first blooms. Plan ahead, and you can surround yourself with your favorite flowers year-round with little effort. It all starts with picking the perfect flowers at the height of their life cycle. You’ll need access to a garden in bloom, a good supply of rubber bands and a dark, dry and cool space to hang the flowers. Then let them dry. One key to success: Harvest the flowers just as they are coming to maturity.
“If flowers are in full bloom or beyond, they won’t tend to last as long,” said Zannah Crowe, a horticulturist for Johnson’s Gardens in Cedarburg. “The other thing is to harvest them at the time of day when they have the least moisture on them. You don’t want to harvest them in the morning when they’ll have dew or rain on them.”
There should never be any fear of failure with drying flowers, she said.
“It’s all about experimenting, and air-drying is easy,” suggests Crowe. “The first thing I ever dried was the Annabel Hydrangeas. It’s a no-brainer because sometimes people are hesitant. They have these beautiful flowers but don’t want to cut them. There are so many flowers on an Annabelle Hydrangea that you don’t mind cutting them.” Once flowers are cut, strip them of their foliage. “All the foliage comes off when it is fresh because everything gets brittle when it is dry,” said Crowe. For most flowers, she just uses her hands to strip the leaves. Don’t be tempted to plunge them into a vase of water at any point. You want them to be as dry as possible for the entire process.
As a general rule, flowers that are multi-petaled are the ones that dry the best. Roses, peonies and yellow types of yarrow are some of Crowe’s favorites for beginners.
Lisa Larsen at Sunborn Gardens in Mount Horeb married into the family business, where dried flowers have been a part of every season for the past 44 years. She regularly posts pictures of her flower arrangements on Instagram, and when it isn’t the growing season, she teaches others to work with cut and dried flowers. To extend the fresh flower and garden business, they dry flowers throughout the year and sell them in the off season.
“Anything can be dried,” Larsen said. “It is just whether it is going to shatter or how it is going to look. Things that don’t work are the things that you dry and turn brown. I like things to look vivid.”
Keep in mind that some things have changed over the years.
“One thing that has been popular, but we should never dry because it is highly invasive, is the teasel,” said Crowe. “You’ll see it along the roadsides. It is a very pretty seedhead, and it was really popular as a dried plant, but it is advocated not to use it now.”
Larsen suggests starting with your favorite flower. Some of her favorites are hydrangeas and gomphrena (globe amaranth). She’s also partial to Dusty Miller to create a silvery backdrop in wreaths.
The process for drying any flower is simple: Pick it at its prime, strip the stem of leaves, gather a small bunch together with a rubber band, and hang. A simple wooden clothes drying rack is a worthy investment, but you can hang flowers anywhere it is cool, dark and dry.
It can’t be said enough that moisture is the enemy of drying flowers.
“Mold is a concern with dried flowers, so air flow is huge,” said Larsen. “You don’t want to make your bunches too big.”
Hang the rubber-banded bunch upside down, using a paperclip or string to hook through the rubber band, if necessary, and let them be until completely dry, which will take several weeks. Remember that flowers will break easily once dried, so handle with care.
“We dry things throughout the season,” said Larsen. “Then when the growing season ends, we pull everything out and start making wreaths.
“We start with a grapevine, which we forage from the land, then we make little circles and make little groupings of dried flowers, then we’re wiring them on to the grapevine and layering. There’s no secret trick to it.
“Over time, the thing that kills them is sun,” she adds. “They fade and get dusty. They’re supposed to last forever, but they don’t always look the same forever.”
Crowe’s trick for combating dust on dried flowers sounds a bit odd, but she swears it works.
“You get the cheapest hairspray you can, the Aquanet in the purple can, and you spray it on the arrangement and it dissolves the dust,” she said. “It cleans it without you having to touch it. I don’t know why it works, but it does.”
“There are other ways to dry flowers using glycerin, silica or sand,” noted Larsen. “We have yet to experiment with anything other than hanging them.”