Your love may last forever, but the fresh roses you receive on Valentine’s Day or other special events won’t. That is, unless you make the effort to dry them – then they’ll be around for as long as you want!
And it’s not just roses. You can do it with garden flowers that wilt as the heat intensifies and they come to the end of their season. Cut your lavender, salvia and other summer flowering plants and bring them indoors for a different perspective.
Traditional drying process
The traditional way to dry flowers is to make sure there is no moisture in the flower or on the stem. Gather them into small bunches and tie them up with string. Many flowers, especially roses, droop at the top of the stem when they begin to fade, so hanging them upside-down fixes this effect.
The bunches must then be stored in a dry, dark place with good ventilation for a couple of weeks. Anywhere near the kitchen, laundry or bathroom means the air has too much moisture and will hamper or even stop the drying process.
This drying process means the petals will shrink a bit and lose some of their vibrant colours, but they’ll still have a pretty faded vintage look.
Silica gel crystals
Drying using silica gel crystals means you will retain most of the colour. Don’t use the little desiccated packets you find in shoeboxes, but special flower drying crystals that come with white and coloured beads. When the coloured beads fade, the gel is no longer active and needs to be replaced.
Simply bury your flowers in a large container of silica gel, and in just a few days or a week you will be able to pop them in a vase (no water, though), in a bowl, or hang them on a wall and display them with all their glory intact. Roses and lavender work really well with this method.
Use the microwave
A quicker method in the long term is to use your microwave oven, but it’s time-consuming in the short term. Put one flower at a time in a microwave container, cover with cat litter, then microwave on high for two or three minutes. Let the cat litter cool down before you take out the flower.
Leave them be
Some flowers, such as hydrangeas and gypsophila, dry out with no effort on your behalf. Cut them from your garden; remove the leaves; put them in a vase with a little water at the bottom; move them to a place that is cool and ventilated but where there is no sunlight; then forget about any more care. The water will soon be gone and the flowers will dry out, but they will still be upright and as pretty as ever. The colour will fade in hydrangeas, so use silica gel if you want to retain colour intensity.
Already dried flowers
One group of flowers come to you already dried. Australian native everlasting daisies are famous for their naturally dried flowers. Paper daisy (Bracteantha bracteata) and straw flowers (Xerochrysum bracteatum) can flower in the garden for several years. They’ll last even longer when cut and brought indoors.
What is the easiest way to dry flowers?
The easiest way to dry flowers is the traditional way of air-drying them.
How do you dry flowers and keep colour?
The best way to maintain the colour of your flowers in the drying process is by using silica gel crystals.
How to preserve fresh flowers permanently?
If you preserve your flowers, they will last forever. We have five ways to preserve your flowers.
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