--There were days in the 1970s when I was a young married woman that dried flowers were very hip. You could go to a fancy gift shop and buy a beautiful cachepot of dried purple larkspur and status, faded roses, and baby’s breath. I loved them, but I didn't buy them. If I was given fresh flowers for a special occasion, when they began to droop, I hung them upside down to dry them, and then arranged them in vessels around the house. I buried delicate heads of Queen Anne’s lace in silica sand to remove moisture for a few days and preserve them for mounting on cards and decoupage.
Then suddenly one day in the late eighties or early nineties I read somewhere someone challenging the idea of putting out dead flowers on tabletops or walls. “I don’t want anything dead decorating my house,” she wrote. “I only want fresh flowers.”
It didn’t occur to me at the time that I didn’t agree with her. Dried flowers were fading from vogue. Carolyne Roehm was publishing large gorgeous picture books on how to arrange fresh flowers, and I was buying them or receiving them as gifts. When Kirstie Alley kicked her cocaine habit, she decided to spend the same amount of money that she had spent weekly on cocaine on fresh flowers. Elton John had two full time staffers just arranging fresh flowers for the rooms of his mansion. At the house where we lived then, we had a dozen pink and fuchsia peony bushes, and I cut some of them for vases. It was a “free” luxury and added life to our rooms.
I spend little time cutting or arranging flowers now, and I’d rather not receive purchased flowers from a florist for a special occasion, feeling that the flower industry is a gigantic waste of resources, shipping them all the way from the Netherlands so I can have them on my table. Here on the farm, hydrangeas in front of the green barn blossom like fine Battenburg lace every spring and stay moist and lovely most of the summer. When the lush petals begin to dry, I think they are still as beautiful, if not even more so, and I know that soon snow will fall and accentuate the shapes and splay of the dried heads.
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I spend little time cutting or arranging flowers now, and I’d rather not receive purchased flowers from a florist for a special occasion, feeling that the flower industry is a gigantic waste of resources, shipping them all the way from the Netherlands so I can have them on my table. Here on the farm, hydrangeas in front of the green barn blossom like fine Battenburg lace every spring and stay moist and lovely most of the summer. When the lush petals begin to dry, I think they are still as beautiful, if not even more so, and I know that soon snow will fall and accentuate the shapes and splay of the dried heads.
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