Dried flower care
Whites and neutrals make a wintery palette
There are few things I love more than being able to preserve some of my summer garden in the form of dried flowers. Having product to share with my customers beyond the short Alberta growing season means I can offer them a sustainable choice when it comes to decorating their homes in the winter months. I call dried flowers the “strawberry jam” of the flower patch. Just as nothing can compare to your own or locally grown berries carefully washed, hulled and cooked with sugar until glossy and canned for winter, dried flowers capture the colors of summer for you to enjoy when the garden is blanketed in white. Keeping those blooms looking vibrant and beautiful requires a bit of care, but your reward is months of enjoyment.
All dried product should be kept indoors. I have had customers ask about displaying my wreaths on their front door or on a fence and this is not feasible. Delicate dried blooms cannot handle outdoor weather and are only meant as decoration for inside your home.
When bringing your dried flowers home consider displaying them in a location that is out of direct sunlight. When I dry flowers, I capture the colours by hanging them in the dark to dry. The bleaching effect of sunlight can be a natural way to turn some plants from green to white but when bright colours like blues, pinks and oranges are left in sunlight, they quickly fade to greys and browns. Keep those colours out of sun and they will stay true for months.
Humidity is another foe of your dried flowers. Once I ran out of room to store my dried bunches in my basement near my wood stove. I saw my flower cooler sitting empty and thought it would serve just as well. Big mistake! I opened the cooler door the next morning to find wilted strawflowers and ammobium. The humidity in my cooler is wonderful for flowers fresh from the garden but even a short dose of it is terrible for dried flowers. For this reason I don’t recommend keeping dried flowers near a shower or bath, or near a kitchen sink.
Like anything displayed for long periods of time, dust will accumulate on your flowers. It can be removed carefully by using a hair dryer on cold or a mini fan on their very lowest setting and held a safe distance away from your blooms to carefully blow off any cobwebs that have settled every few months.
One last consideration is cats. I’ve never experienced this personally but I hear from my customers that cats love dried flowers, or more accurately, they love to destroy dried flowers. It must be all the shapes and textures that attract them. If you have curious felines in your homes, consider keeping your bouquet in a cat proof spot.
With these considerations in mind, you should be able to keep your dried bouquet in excellent condition for many months. Like any natural product though, they do degrade naturally over time. When you feel they are at the end of their lifespan, you can safely dispose of them in your compost. I never spray my dried flowers with any preservative or glues or use any paints, bleaches or dyes. This practice is truly appalling to me as someone who actively avoids pesticides and herbicides when farming. Why would I take all that natural beauty and turn it into something that has to go into the toxic waste bin? I want to put all my scraps into my compost to help grow the next season’s bouquet ingredients. As a Boreal Blooms customer, you can feel safe burning, composting or adding your bouquet to the municipal green waste program because they contain nothing but natural plant material. You can’t improve upon nature!