The price of flowers is skyrocketing, as anyone who has purchased an arrangement recently can tell you. We encourage our members to disassemble their bouquets from Valentine’s Day, birthdays, Mother’s Day, dinner parties, and especially Thanksgiving, and dry what can be dried for use during Wreath Week. Drying is not rocket science – put a rubber band around stems and hang upside down on a cabinet handle, door, or hook. Not everything dries well, but a surprising number of unlikely blooms do, and often look nothing like their original form. A dried rose is clearly still a rose, but during Wreath Week we spend time every year asking “What is this?” while holding up an interesting stem or pod. Sometimes they are blueberry twigs, or garlic scapes, or calla lilies, transformed. A bit of spray paint gussies up items that are a little too brown. There is brown (rich chestnut brown or deep mahogany,) and then there is brown (who tracked that in brown.) Below is a graceful wreath from 2010 with plenty of dried flowers, appropriate for an indoor setting.
