Dried Flowers

Pick up a strawflower that was cut in high summer and hung in a dark cupboard, and it rustles. In October it is still the same hot orange or clear lemon it was in August, and still the same shape. That is the quiet appeal of growing flowers for drying: you raise them for one season and they keep working for you through the next.

This book takes you through the whole business, from the seed packet to the jug on the mantelpiece. It shows you how to plan a drying patch or tuck drying crops into the borders you already have, how to grow the everlastings, grasses and seedheads that dry well wherever you garden, and how to cut each one at the right moment, which matters rather more than most people expect. Then it turns to the drying itself, with each method explained step by step, and on to keeping colour, storing and arranging what you’ve made.

What’s inside

• Planning a drying garden: site, soil, succession sowing, and a dark, dry, airy place to hang the harvest
• Sowing and raising strawflowers, statice, globe amaranth, larkspur, love-in-a-mist and the rest, with timings for your own seasons
• Supports, watering and lean feeding that keep stems long and straight
• Harvest stages plant by plant, from statice to honesty, and a harvest-day routine
• Air drying by hanging, standing, water drying and laying flat, plus three ways with hydrangeas
• Silica gel, borax mixtures and sand for roses and other fragile flowers, and microwave drying for the impatient
• Pressing flowers, leaves and ferns, and preserving beech, magnolia and eucalyptus foliage with glycerine
• Holding on to colour, and protecting dried flowers from damp and the beetles that would like to eat them
• Bouquets, wreaths, pressed-flower pictures, cards and lavender bags
• Plant profiles for everlastings, other flowers, seedheads, grasses and foliage, with a month-by-month calendar and quick-reference tables

Who it’s for

If you’ve never dried a flower, start at the beginning. Every term is explained as it appears, and you can begin with little more than secateurs, a supply of rubber bands and a dark, dry cupboard. If you already grow for cutting, you’ll find stage-by-stage harvesting notes, desiccant timings, and the current botanical names given alongside the ones still printed on seed packets, so you’ll know Xerochrysum bracteatum whichever label it’s wearing.

Cut a little before you think you should, and the cupboard will start to fill.