Preserving Flowers – three ways to remember the summer garden

I have been both surprised and delighted by my garden this spring and summer. The newly planted Wildflower Garden has provided daily colourful pickings and I hope it will go on to offer continuous colour until the first frosts. And I am keen on preserving flowers from the garden as much as I can to remind us in the cooler months what we can look forward to again next year. Preserving flowers for me comes in the form of homespun floral arrangements, simple rose and lavender wreaths and by pressing individual flower heads for future flower art and gifts. And this week I thought I would show you how I go about doing all three…

A quick and simple dried flower arrangement

Let me begin with my usual get out of jail free card. When it comes to arranging fresh or dried flowers, I am no florist. I put together simple homespun arrangements as a way of preserving flowers for our enjoyment. Recently I picked this little wire basket up for the princely sum of one whole pound on a treasure hunt. I had absolutely no idea what I would do with it I just knew it would come in handy one day. And it was as I was drying out hydrangea heads recently I decided how I would use it.

This year my hydrangea have been pretty unremarkable. I’ve grown them in pots since the front of our home where they will live one day, is far from ready. And despite a few feeds they have produced nothing other than a lot of green leaves. The two new ones which did flower, didn’t offer an awful lot of heads to dry. Those which I did dry, I hung decoratively in the warm sitting room for a few weeks adorned with fairy lights. Conversely I have no trouble at all growing lavender. So I decided to combine these two beauties in an informal display for my sitting room, to take us through until later in the year. I began with the basket and a ball of my trusty chicken wire as I did in this post and this time, I also used a little twisted hazel to spill over the sides of the basket and help with structure. And then I placed the small hydrangea heads all over the supporting system.

And then keeping the shape as symmetrical as I could, I simply poked varying lengths of lavender into the display. It wasn’t until I had completed the arrangement, I thought how lovely twinkling lights would have looked incorporated here too. Despite its lack of lights though, I am rather pleased with how this ten minute flower art display worked out …

Rose and Lavender Wreaths

Then it was the turn of lavender wreaths for the shutters. Possibly my favourite way for preserving flowers. I had already made a rose and lavender wreath earlier on in the summer and after a few lovely followers on Instagram had offered supportive comments, I decided to try to make another the same. Or at least as similar to the original wreath as possible. I used something bendy from the garden and twisted several lengths around one another until they made a circle for the wreaths base. I tied three long lavender stems together with a length of florist wire and secured this to the wreath. Then using my trusty glue gun I secured rose heads I had dried earlier in the year to the wreath, covering the exposed wire. And finally I tied strips of a pretty floral tea towel I had saved for just the right project. Unlike the dried floral arrangement, these rose and lavender wreaths did get the benefit of twinkling lights and a couple of home-made paper garlands too. The two wreaths are not perfectly identical, more imperfectly so. And I’m happy with that.

It only seemed fair that the smaller shutters in the sitting room had a little decorative faffing themselves. This time I took three stems of a Lavender Hidcote with its deeper purple buds and bound them together with the florist wire again taking care to make sure there was plenty of wire left to fasten to the wreath base. Then I repeated this step twice more, using nine stems of lavender in total for each wreath. I placed the first bunch pointing slightly down on the wreath and secured with the wire. The next bunch was placed and attached more centrally and the final bunch placed pointing up a bit and again fastened securely. Everso slightly technical and terribly simple. And again with glue gun in hand, the more apricot coloured roses were stuck on to obscure all the wires. Same tea towel for the ties and two slightly different rose and lavender wreaths created for two smaller shutters…

Preserving Flowers in a Flower Press

And finally, in a bid to preserve a little of this year’s Wildflower Garden beauty, I have revisited a flower art craft I did many moons ago with my dear Grandmother. I recall our family like many others owning a huge Encyclopedia Britannica collection. I am sure at some point I must have read some of these gigantic books. That I don’t recall. What I do recall is selecting tiny flowers from our garden and pressing the delicate petals between the pages of the books protected with sheets of tissue paper. My ‘Nan’ lived only a few doors from my childhood home and I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with her as a little girl. She would collect my sister and I from school several nights a week whilst our parents worked and we would have buns and squash for a treat before tea at her kitchen table. And we would check regularly to see if the pressed petals were dry enough to use in our own unique flower art projects, like birthday cards, gift tags and bookmarks for friends and family.

I’ve selected tiny flowers from my garden and put them in the pages of some old books this summer. Mr M found me improvising a flower press with heavy objects the other day and enquired as to what on earth I was doing. When I told him I didn’t have a flower press and I thought the Le Cruset pan would be a suitable weight, he produced these rather technical looking clamps and suggested I tried them out. They worked perfectly although not aesthetically pleasing…

Then on a recent treasure hunt I found this quaint old flower press in a junk shop and decided to take it home with me and try it out. This selection of pretty flower heads are drying out quite nicely in there now. And this flower press sitting around the home is aesthetically pleasing enough for me.

In the coming weeks I will have a new craft post to share with you showcasing my own particular style of flower art which I hope may inspire you to have a go yourself and perhaps create some gifts for your own families and friends for Christmas. There we go, still only August and I have mentioned the Christmas word already; I do find it pays to be prepared though. And very soon I shall bring you a story of how I go about preserving flowers Mother Nature provides for us all in our beautiful countryside and parklands which I hope you will enjoy. Oh and I have a very exciting ‘french feel’ up-cycle in the next few weeks, so do stay tuned so you don’t miss a thing. For now though, I wish for you a happy week and I hope you’ll be here again next Thursday x

I bought my flower press from a vintage junk shop. I’ve found three other budget friendly options should you decide your life is not complete without one!