Incorporating Dried Flowers in your growing space

Growing and drying my own flowers is an important part of my business. I can’t always buy the things I like to create with, so growing my own is the only way I can truly create displays and products the way I want them to look. The seeds I’m sowing now, are being sown with projects and creations in mind for later in the year and into the Winter of 2022 and even some weddings the following summer. Working with dried flowers in this way, requires a degree of planning and a great lot of patience to boot!

Every year I learn more and more about the plants and foliage that dry well. I know that the possibilities are endless and I am constantly seeking out new tones and textures. In case you have only just stumbled across me and aren’t aware of my recent life changes, I thought I would share where I am now and where I’ve come from when it comes to gardening and growing. I think it’s important to know the scale of the change we’ve made and the things it’s enabling me to do and grow, but also to know that you don’t need oodles of land to grow flowers to try, the point is to start somewhere.

My Past Gardens

For the past 20 years of my life, I’ve lived very happily in various town centre houses, one with a garden that tripled in size whilst we lived there (from mini to average for a town house, through some fortuitous land deeds), one third floor balcony garden set in the leafy Joordan district of Amsterdam and most recently up until last September a flourishing, mature but tiny garden in our home town in Surrey. I have also been the lucky tenant of an allotment for over ten years, which we’ve just now passed on to the new owners.

Because of this, I am used to gardening in small space, its been my thing. I’ve filled the few trees I had in my old garden with hanging baskets full of flowers to eat and press and grown armfuls of strawflowers down the thinest strip of flower bed alongside the boundary wall of my house. One year, I even sowed a wild flower meadow in a one metre long strip out the front of our house. I can fill every space imaginable with flowers and plants, as a result of having such little space to grow in.

So to find myself here in a garden in East Devon, that stretches to just shy of half an acre is a little mind boggling. I would go so far as to say that I don’t know what I’m doing or even how to tackle it! The reality is that I will leave much of the land to nature and work in harmony with what is already here (you can read more about my garden here) but I do have business needs which means I have begun the exciting adventure of scaling up my dried flower growing (ad)ventures.

Me and Dried Flowers

My journey with dried flowers started nearly five years ago now when Botanical Tales was born (at about the same time as Arlo was also born!). At that point, I was buying my dried flowers, despite being a gardener it hadn’t really clicked that I could also grow my own flowers to dry. I blame the new born fog for this. It wasn’t too long before I put two and two together and slowly begun to turn much of our allotment over to growing flowers to dry. The first year was epic, I choose flowers for their appearance only (lesson learnt) and just throw my heart and soul into growing these flowers. Everything flourished, even the Bells of Ireland, it was as if the seeds knew that they needed to show me how good it could be and indeed, they put on the best show. After that first year and as my business began to grow I realised I needed to be a little more organised about what I chose to sow, ie it needed to be flowers that I would end up using in my work. What came with that realisation was a sort of pressure that meant I still throw all my heart and soul into growing but I also had much higher expectations, it mattered if things didn’t flourish and I experience many more failures now. Three years on I still haven’t had another year like that first year, yet I continue to learn and grow.

What makes a good dried flower

When people ask me what flowers are the best to dry, I always answer in the same way. It depends, on so many things and what you’re willing to accept when it comes to dried materials. True everlastings such as statice and strawflowers will dry to look as near to their fresh self as possible, these are the flowers whose petals are papery to the touch when fresh and whose colours last for years. Then you have flowers that fall into what I class as the “easy to dry” varieties, in this group you will find delphiniums, nigella, honesty and much more. These flowers will lose some of their vibrancy and will often shrink dramatically but non the less add something else to a display or creation and will last. Finally you have the tricky numbers, I’m looking at the dahlias, tulips, ranunculus and such like. Fleshy beauties that can go floppy at a hint of damp but are the real stunners, to me they are the equivalent of the quiet mysterious girl or guy at the party (the one I always wanted to be!), these blooms dry exquisitely and I defy anyone to say they aren’t beautiful in an intriguing and beguiling way.

A combination of annuals and perennials will give you a strong mix of structures to dry and create with. Add in your foraged foliage and twigs from your surroundings and you’ll have the ability to design work that is nature led and has flow and movement to it. Where annual flowers can give you the glitz and the glamour (if there is such a thing within the world of dried flowers), perennials can give you the point of difference. Those things that make your work unique and that people will ask you about and request more of again and again.

My plans for growing this year

In the past I’ve focussed primarily on annuals, utilising more and more space on the allotment to grow them. The next step was to incorporate perennials in to the old town garden to utilise space in my one flower bed and now I plan on just expanding that idea even further! I am obsessed with foliage and perennials and texture and tones and annuals alone aren’t enough for me and my work anymore nor for the way I want my garden to look. My desire is to look out on a dark winters day, to seedheeds and grasses swaying in the breeze, rather than the dark empty soil of annual beds. So this is really forming the choices I have made about which seeds I’ve chosen to sow this year. And to have the space I now do is incredibly exciting whilst overwhelmingly daunting!

I know many of you are keen to know my favourite plants to grow for drying and I am currently putting together a dried flower sowing and cutting ebook that will be ready in the next few months. Sign up to my newsletter to be the first to hear of it.