The Art, Heart and Science of Floral Preservation
- daysofdahlia
- Oct 27
- 5 min read
It’s 27 October 2025, Dahlias are still flowering on in the polytunnel (miraculously), and they are now being joined by Chrysanthemums, which feels like an unlikely tag team in the relay race of flower seasons. But the weather this year has been so warm, considering that we lost all of our dahlias to frost on 18 September 2024, I am not complaining, just seasonally bamboozled.
There have been quite a few storms, some forecast, some unpredicted which always make the glass studio doors and windows a little dusty. The morning’s sunlight shows every streak and smudge on the windows, as if deliberately criticising us. I try not to get distracted by the urge to clean them, there are far more important and pressing jobs to do at this time of year. Like admiring and sorting through dried flowers.
The sunlight rests on each dried flower laid out in neat rows on the workbench. This is their time to be in the spotlight. Their colours are so interesting, some are still brilliant, and others have yielded to the soft ochres of decline. I am drawn to the more faded flowers, the pale roses and blanched sweet pea vines, then there are those which appear so changed I don’t recognise them. What is that? I ask mum as we turn it around in our fingertips trying to locate it in the garden of our minds. We sort them into bundles and boxes, separating them or combining them into bunches of 10, being so careful, as they tangle themselves together and fall apart, some hanging by a thread or a whisper. I find that tending to flowers in their second life, as they dry and rest, demands a gentleness even more attentive than their cultivation itself.
Strawflowers are one of my favourites, easy to grow, beautiful in the ground and in the vase, and then being the ultimate master in keeping form and colour beyond the bloom. They seem immortal, with bracts instead of petals which are already crisp and papery in their fresh state, and refuse decay as if some magical force had sealed them. But each flower holds a distinct temperament in their afterlife.
All of these flowers were harvested over a long stretch of time, from March right through to just a few weeks ago, their stems were bound with twine and hung upside down in the airy loft of our studio rafters. Others are resting in vases dotted around the studio. Some, like the sweet pea vines or the stocks have succumbed to the bleaching force of sunlight which I really like. It makes it even more amazing to wonder why some retain their green so well. The flowers that have been hung upside down point their petals downwards or upwards when you turn them the right way up. Or they appear to have melted in a vase with little coy heads nodding towards the ground. Gravity is the sculptor here, preserving form or changing it all together.
I am also looking through some pressed poppies which lay between the pages of blotting paper. There is patience required here, we must wait as nature herself would, days or weeks, until the petals lose their moisture and their pliancy, holding fast to colour and vein to create new forms that are like tissue paper or insect wings.
I have been thinking about all the awful and unsustainable ways the industry uses to preserve flowers; desiccants like silica gel or glycerin solutions or with bleaches or synthetic dyes or even making fake versions with plastic. All of this seems like an act of defiance against a natural cycle which is mirrored in life itself, a shortcut and a lack of acceptance and engagement with process. Our secret ingredient to drying flowers: air. Drying flowers and guiding them through a state change, from wet to dry, can be seen as building a dialogue between the past and the present. For me, flower preservation is not conquest over decay but a kind of truce, I accept you will never be the same, but I embrace your change. Something to hold onto in life. Preservation, then, is not defiance, but a sort of devotion; a way of saying, you were beautiful, and you remain so, still. Maybe it’s like watching the wrinkles form on the face of a loved one, an honour if gifted the chance. If fresh flowers are hopeful, then dried flowers are nostalgia.
Someone asked me why do flowers dry and not rot, and the answer is somewhere between botany and alchemy. I will explain. A flower dries when the conditions of decay are denied. The act of rotting is also a lifeforce which happens when microorganisms like bacteria and fungi find the warmth, moisture, and nutrients they need to break organic matter down. Rot is life continuing, microbes and fungi breaking down tissue, a natural continuation of the circle of life. Drying, by contrast, is the act of withholding what decay requires. When a flower is cut and hung to dry rather than left in the ground or in a vase of water, its cells slowly lose water through evaporation. Microbial life which thrives in dampness cannot flourish once the moisture drops below a certain threshold. Without water, both the enzymes within the plant and the microbes that digest plant tissue go dormant or die. Some plants have inherent qualities that lend themselves to preservation. As I mentioned before, the strawflower has tough, papery bracts instead of petals. These dry beautifully because they contain a substance called lignin found in wood and bark and it is that substance that resists collapse from a cellular level. Flowers such as lavender and roses contain essential oils and tannins that also deter microbial activity. The reason a flower dries is that the water is evaporated faster than microbial growth can begin, and the tissue is effectively sealed in time. The flower becomes inert, not alive and not decomposing, with the plant’s structural proteins and cell walls remaining intact and holding their form. Basically, rotting is life continuing with bacteria and fungi feeding and transforming matter into decay. Drying is the life of the flower paused, moisture withdrawn, time slowed, and beauty suspended at the edge of inertia.
For dried flowers, it is not decay that claims them, but the florist.
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