When I was a wedding florist, I used to get asked all the time about the best ways to preserve a bridal bouquet. More often than not I’d suggest taking it apart and either hanging it upside down to air dry it, or pressing each individual stem separately.
The latter option works beautifully with smaller and more slender flowers, but have you ever tried pressing a rose? Or any large bloom for that matter? It just doesn’t work. The heads are too big to fully flatten, and the first few times I attempted this for clients I would end up with a sad-looking brown mound of petals as a result. Not what you want to be showing a newly wed.
But fret not, for there is another option. And Joanna Gaines just shared it with us in a post about her magical and inspiring herbarium, where she does all of her wonderful flower preserving. In the video, she produced a fully dried and preserved rose from a plastic tub full of silica gel – a sand-like substance, which absorbs can moisture from a flower head. Here’s exactly how it works to dry flowers, and what other pieces of preserving kit we spotted in Joanna’s enchanting herbarium.
How silica gel works to dry flowers
Joanna describes her herbarium as a library of what she grows in the garden each year. As she says, preserving flowers is a way of ‘recording your seasonal garden, but in a more artsy way’.
In the video she takes out a large plastic storage box, exactly like these ones from Amazon, and takes the lid off to reveal several preserved roses heads buried in a sand-like material – silica gel. Once she gently shakes off the gel from the petals, we can see a perfectly preserved rose.
Silica gel works by drawing out moisture from a flower, which means it will entirely preserve its color, shape and form. Because this process tends to happen quite quickly (within a couple of weeks), it prevents the flower head from decaying.
Most types of silica gel contain a color-changing element, which indicates when the preservation process has completed.
If you want to give this a go and preserve a bunch of blooms from your garden, you’ll need quite a large amount to fill a deep box. We recommend at least 10L, this amount of silica gel from Amazon is ideal.
Joanna explains her roses have been in the gel for about two months and are totally dry, but they look as fresh as if they had just been cut, retaining their form and color completely.
Other ways to preserve flowers
As well as air drying them, a stunning method for preserving flowers and herbs is by pressing them, using a flower press kit just like this from Amazon.
Joanna shows us a beautifully rustic display of pressed herbs and flowers in a frame, as a way of displaying what she has grown in the garden every season.
This method requires a little more time and patience than preserving in silica gel, but the excitement of the reveal when you lift the press is worth it.
If you’re feeling super crafty, you can also encase flowers in liquid resin, available from Amazon, to make decorative objects, jewelry or ornaments.
Dried flower display gems we spotted in Joanna’s herbarium
Once you’ve pressed your flowers, you need the perfect frame in which to display them. And this set of three is the perfect way to display them. The hinged mechanism makes it super easy to enclose your design, with minimal movement required.
You can get so creative with preserved flowers and a glass cloche like this. I’ve made miniature gardens in them before, using moss at the base. Or you could keep it more simple and minimalist by displaying a bunch of dried yarrow or nigella seed pods vertically.
If you decide to air dry bunches of your flowers, this wall hanger is a stylish way of making an artful feature out of them. You can watch as your piece of art changes as the flowers dry and decay.
As we saw when we glimpsed inside the magical world of Joanna Gaines’ herbarium, there are so many different ways of decorating with dried flowers. What a wonderful way to keeping a physical record of your gardening year, and creating your own wall or display art in the process.