I had the privilege of going on a wreath course at Allt y Bela (yes, Arne Maynard’s place) with the Garden Gate Flower Company once. They had the most beautiful hamper of ribbons (I can still remember the mustard velvet) and buckets and buckets of seed heads and grasses. They also had the most incredible dried roses. We all clustered round and ooh’d and aah’d and asked them how they’d dried such perfect buds. Maz looked utterly bewildered for a few seconds and then said ‘well… you cut some roses, and then you dry them’. It still makes me laugh. We make stuff so complicated and sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. There are really complicated ways of drying dahlias involving silica gel and microwaves, but I don’t have a microwave and I have neither the time nor the inclination for complexity. So this is how I do it. The heads will break off at least a third of them and at least a fifth will go mouldy, especially with the really big dinner plate ones (worth it though) so do hang up more than you eventually need.

Pompon and ball dahlias dry brilliantly. My absolute favourites are the ones with a few variations in the colour, the little streaks and marks on the backs of the petals. Cornel ones are especially good. I have a purple that it unbearably hard in colour in its natural state, but looks incredible once dried.

Pick quite young flowers. If you use ones that are already going over, all the petals will just fall off. Turn the flower round and give the back petals a bit of a tug; if they are loose, drying or a bit limp, the bloom is too far gone.

Cut in the cool and give them a drink. You then need a cool dry place which has air circulation but not in direct sunlight. (Strong light will bleach the colours out.) I use a piece of copper pipe strung up in front of my inglenook. My cottage is so dark that no light penetrates to the centre of my sitting room but there is air on all sides. They’ll be dry before the time comes to light the fire anyway.

Whether or not you bunch or tie up individually very much depends upon your character. Obviously, hanging each stem individually means that you have lots more air around and they are less likely to go mouldy but this is a jolly tedious task if you have a lot of flowers. I compromise on a bunch of three or four.

The way you hang them is not important for how well they dry, but if you aren’t careful, as the stems dry and shrink, they will slide out of the string. I use some quite fine twine sort of string, wrapped using a lark’s head knot (I cannot explain this in words, please see here) so that I can just go along the row and tighten every few days or so. This is especially important in the first few days when the shrinkage is at its most rapid.

You will probably know within a few days which flowers are going to be fantastic. If they start to go brown or mouldy, just chuck them. The ones that make it look wonderful in a little jar on their own, or put into autumnal wreaths.

Bizarrely, dried dahlias have a lovely scent. Even more crazily, if you hold a dried dahlia over a steaming kettle it will magically come back to life. Yes, you can have fresh dahlias in January.