Make the most of a heatwave by drying flowers
Bex’s studio
This high summer heat makes my English country garden feel like another country. But there are some upsides. My ammi has dried on the plant and I have six foot, pale gold, trees. I have more echinops than is normal for one garden (it self sows) and I have started to cut and hang the funny blue globe thistles wherever I can. I think we may have spiky baubles on the Christmas trees this year.
I have finally got round to putting a sheila maid (a slatted laundry rack that hangs from the ceiling) in the apex of the studio. It fits perfectly and is filling up rapidly with grasses and ammi, bronze fennel and roses. (Roses in bud for drying.) Even though they tangle in my hair when I am packing seeds, I feel like a squirrel collecting a harvest for the lean times.
I was going to write you a long and very detailed how to on this (because there is nothing more disappointing than mouldy and damp flowers, just when your mind turns to autumnal wreaths) and then I realised, who better to ask than Bex Partridge? The doyenne of dried flowers and author extraordinaire. So here you go. Everything you need to know to preserve some of your precious bounty from this crazy crazy heat.
Dry
The first one is the space in which you dry in needs to be completely free of moisture. So that means somewhere like a bathroom or a kitchen or a damp outbuilding or shed is not going to work. When you're drying, you're trying to draw moisture out of the plant and that needs to happen at a pretty steady rate for it to be effective. If you have a space which is full of moisture, that it's going to be very difficult for the moisture to leave the plant and the plants material would just go mouldy. Once you have problems with mould, it can spread. If you don’t have a damp-free space, there are ways around it. Dehumidifiers do work. Not a necessity, and it's only because this is my business that I had to invest in one.
Not too hot and not too cold
The second one is temperature. So as much as possible, you want to have an ambient room temperature, for the majority of the time when you're drying your flowers. That means not too hot, not too cold. If it's too hot, the flowers would dry too quickly and they'll probably go brittle and that made them really hard to work with. If it's too cold, the moisture takes too long to leave the plants. And you might be back in the situation that you had if you have moisture in your air, which is they can go a bit damp and moldy. That's particularly the case with the sort of tulips and the ranunculus and things that take a lot of drying.
Light
The final one is light. Light is a bit of a funny one because I will always recommend that you dry things in a dark space, but the reality is I don't do that. There's a couple of reasons for that: I personally love to see plants as they dry, to watch the process. I want to understand and see how long it takes them in and what happens to their structures, and if they're shoved in a dark space, that makes it really difficult for me to do that.
What I will say is that as long as you have it have them drying out of direct sunlight, you should be fine. I dry everything here in my studio on my test wall, so I can see how they'll dry. It's in light although it doesn't get any direct sun.
The reason you don't want them to dry in direct sunlight or too much intense light is that the light can fade the flowers and it can affect their color. They can also go a bit brittle, same as with the heat. The exception to the rule I would say is if you are, if you have something like an ammi and you dry it in a greenhouse, as long as it's not too damp but somewhere super warm with light, you can actually naturally bleach plants, which is beautiful. (Grace adds: This also works with Bells of Ireland.)
Hanging
You can dry flowers either in bunches of five or seven, although things like tulips will benefit from being hung individually so there is air circulating around. Strip all the leaves off first.
Things mostly take between two to six weeks to dry. They can be left in situ whilst they're dried, if that's what you wish to do; I leave a lot of my things just hanging in there until I want to use them. However, you can pack them up into cardboard boxes with tissue, paper, and newspaper and store them until you want to use them. The main thing is that you need to keep them moisture free.
