Dried Flowers in Winter

Strawflowers are the queen of dried flowers.

As an aspiring flower farmer, I'm in love with all my tiny seedlings each year, but one flower has risen to the top of her game and that is the lovely Strawflower (helichrysum bracteatum, to use her botanical name). These flowers, when properly dried, retain all of their shape and appeal. In fact, the only way to know if a flower is fresh or dried is to examine the stems. They typically become thin and brittle but the flowers look like the day you picked them.

When it comes to dried flowers, more is more.

All last season I would visit the garden daily (or more) and gather the flowers at their peak to be hung to dry upside down in the shed. I'd bundle them with a rubber band and check on them about a month later to see how the drying process was going, but it wasn't until the growing season was over and I was taking inventory that I realized just how many flowers I'd gotten out of my garden. There's nothing like a huge bunch of dried flowers to get you through a long cold Maine winter.

Even when they are all the way open these flowers have character.

I try to collect strawflowers just before they are half open so that the spikey petals remain as the overall flower head. They keep opening even after you pick them, so often you will end up with the seed head in the center and the petals reaching backwards. They will still be beautiful in their own way, but they will look a little less like their fresh counterparts - it's just a matter of preference.

Strawflowers seem to have their own personality even among the others in the bouquet.

And every time I articulate my preference to pick them early for the petals, I come across a stem that is exactly the shape I try to avoid, but that displays so much personality it makes me want to pick them at all intervals of growth. That yellow face surrounded by the deep red petals looks like a tiny lion demanding attention. I'm looking forward to my 3rd season of growing, which is just around the (very cold) corner.