Preserved blooms have never looked fresher: everlasting flowers have broken free from their dusty, chintzy image and continue to grow in popularity.

Clever bloom raiders can capture the beauty of fresh flowers in perpetuity by hanging them in ventilated areas or drying them with hot air in special chambers.

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Whether you love the ethereal magic of simply dried flowers and foliage in their natural glory or prefer to see the blooms dyed in sherbet or vibrant hues, everlasting flowers offer a chance to bring the outside in…for longer.

Dried flowers were found in Egyptian tombs that date back 4,000 years and dried nosegays were all the rage in the 16th century, particularly in a bid to ward off unpleasant odours and nasty diseases.

The Greeks and Romans loved floral and foliage crowns, flower garlands were popular in England in the 17th century and the Victorians embraced a complicated language around flowers which was used for secret communication.

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Dried flowers were on-trend in the 1950s, then flowered again in the 1970s and 1980s and are now blooming in popularity once more as a source of interior inspiration in the form of bouquets, wreaths and installations. They are also increasingly in demand for weddings.

What started for many as a lockdown moment, when getting hold of fresh flowers was off the cards due to the closure of supply chains and floristry shops, has bloomed into a full-grown trend which shows no sign of wilting.

Whether your love affair with dried flowers started when you pressed daisies between the pages of a novel, or has grown since spending more time at home, there are many reasons to embrace these low-maintenance, versatile, forgiving, sometimes eco-friendly, endlessly adaptable blooms.

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Natalie Boon runs The Wild Folk Florist, based in the countryside near Norwich. She grows flowers in her unusually (for Norfolk) steep terraced garden and then uses them for fresh and dried flower bouquets.

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Just as our forebears were unable to walk into a florist’s shop in the middle of winter and buy fresh carnations or chrysanthemums without a second thought, Natalie works seasonally: when she has no fresh flowers in her garden, she uses her dried stock.

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In the darker days of winter, the desire to bring nature indoors doesn’t disappear and with dried flowers providing a long-lasting alternative to fresh stems, Natalie switches to the flowers she’s preserved from November to March.

“I call myself an eco-florist because I grow my own flowers and I aim to be completely sustainable – if I need to get rid of pests in the garden, I rely on frogs and toads!” says Natalie, who started her business in 2019.

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“I work with what I have, which means that if something doesn’t grow, I don’t have it to use in my bouquets. It is so important to me to work with the seasons – you don’t need to import to have colour in the winter.”

Bitten by the growing bug in 2010 when she had only a tiny balcony outside her Hackney flat, Natalie and her husband moved to Cambridge and her love affair with homegrown flowers really started.

“It’s been a long road to get where I am,” Natalie explains to me, “I started out as a primary school teacher and by the age of 26 was a deputy head teacher.

“My job was all about long hours and targets, but then I had my son and trying to mesh motherhood with working in a pretty inflexible environment was really difficult.”

In her spare time, Natalie turned her Cambridge garden into a natural paradise complete with wildlife pond: “It was like stress therapy for me. I’d sit at the table and look into the garden and there would be frogs and dragonflies and I’d watch the space coming to life and think ‘I did that’,” she says.

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On a tight budget, she grew the flowers for her own wedding (“I had no idea what I was doing. My friends had to help me cut in the heat of the midday sun on my wedding day!”) and loved it. She did a morning floral course on bouquets and buttonholes and her sister asked if she’d grow the flowers for HER wedding.

“I started making more of an effort and after my sister’s wedding someone else asked me if I could do their wedding flowers and it grew and grew,” says Natalie.

Turning a much-loved hobby into a business wasn’t without its difficulties, but after moving to Norwich and then to South Norfolk, Natalie is establishing her flower field: a true labour of love, with the emphasis on ‘labour’.

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“There were points when I was wheeling barrows up a 45 degree hill with watering cans in them or shovelling horse manure in the snow where I thought I’d made the biggest mistake every, but then you look at the flowers and think ‘no, this was exactly the right thing to do’,” she says.

Her stress relief is “playing with dried flowers”.

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“During the winter, I just lose myself in my dried flower stock. I might just take photos of different colours of dried flowers together, or make myself something unusual with the textures and the colours I love most,” she says.

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“When I’m making wreathes or bouquets there’s just something that happens to my brain – I just switch off and go into a trance and enjoy thinking what colours will go with each other and what will look best.

“It’s a time when you’re filled with colour and joy and that’s what dried flowers can do, in the depths of winter. There’s no need for artificially heated grown flowers or imports, we have it all here.

“I dry almost everything – sometimes it doesn’t work, but it normally does and the textures and colours you can have are incredible.”

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Natalie recently worked on a large-scale installation for Holkham Hall in which she used dried flowers from the hall’s gardens to transform the Victorian kitchen into a floral wonderland with other makers.

Her sustainable dried flower display formed part of the candlelight Christmas tour and used flowers from the hall’s walled garden which were dried in the Old Bakery in the cellars.

“I was like a kid in a sweet shop in that garden!” Natalie laughs, “I thought: ‘if I never do anything else, this will be enough!’”

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Another of Natalie’s gorgeous dried flower installations is at The Boars in Spooner Row and she recently offered a sold-out selection of dried flower bouquets for Valentine’s Day.

As the days lengthen and the flowers grow, it will be time to prepare for the biggest section of her business – weddings – and cultivate the garden for another season before cutting, drying and beginning the process again.

She hopes to host more of the workshops she began last year and already has a packed diary – but as her garden grows, so does her love for what she’s created.

“When you’re outside and working with flowers you get a sense of how fragile and wonderful our relationship with nature is and how we can build something beautiful without chemicals,” she says.

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Lisa Angel, whose eponymous company began in 2004 when she sold her car to fund her dream and began selling bespoke designs at craft fairs in Norfolk, started looking to stock dried flowers pre-pandemic in 2019.

In addition to the brand’s two outlets, global website, wholesale business and partnership with Not on the High Street, Lisa Angel now boasts a pop-up shop dedicated to dried flowers.

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The Norfolk Flower Room can be found in Chantry Place shopping centre in Norwich on the ground floor and boasts a host of gorgeous dried blooms in curated bouquets, wreaths and posies.

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“It’s been so popular,” Lisa tells me, “it was due to close in January but we’re keeping it open until after Mother’s Day because so many people love the flowers.”

Lis travelled to Australia in 2019 and was struck by “the boho vibe” of the dried flowers she kept seeing there and was keen to bring a little of this floral heaven back home with her.

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“They looked so lovely and I kept thinking ‘I have to do something with this idea…’ I hadn’t seen dried flowers much in the UK and I knew that people would love their eco-credentials and the fact that you could give flowers that would last.

“The sheer variety of dried flowers and their versatility is incredible. There is so much you can do with them that you can’t with fresh flowers and if you look after them they can last for years.”

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When lockdown was announced, Lisa quickly realised she needed something to focus on.

“I had to keep busy and thought this could be my chance to do something with dried flowers, so I went on the hunt for them – I dried my own, bought from UK producers and started to experiment.”

Lisa, who undertook online floristry training in lockdown, adds: “I am not a florist but I set out to learn how to make something really beautiful with dried flowers.

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“It was just me in my lounge and as the flowers came in and as I got better at making bouquets, the lounge was taken over and in the end I was using the sofas turned upside-down as drying racks for flowers!

“It felt like therapy being surrounded by all this beauty and fragrance. It was lovely!”

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The dried flower bouquets, all made by Lisa at home, went online in her store and almost immediately she sold out.

“I began to call people in to help – my daughter in the beginning – and we just made bouquet after bouquet,” she says

“I didn’t have my normal support from the team as everyone was at home. I wasn’t until Mother’s Day 2021 that production moved out of my house!”

Lisa now has a team of seven who work making dried flower products for her at her premises in Rackheath. Lisa Angel offers wedding bouquets and enhanced bouquets with crystals added to them from Norwich from Angels Crystals at Guildhall.

“I went in at Christmas to help make wreaths and it was lovely, not like work at all. We all had a go and the rest of the staff now want to join in this Christmas!”

·Find out more at hewildfolkflorist.co.uk and lisaangel.co.uk

How to look after dried flowers

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· Keep dried flowers in a cool, dry spot away from direct sunlight

· To keep them clean, gently dust off larger leaves and blooms

· Gently blow on more delicate stems to remove dust

· Dried flowers will naturally fade over time, but this is part of their charm

· Be very gentle: the blooms will become more delicate as time goes on

· Place in an area where there isn’t a lot of movement

· Dried flowers can last for up to three years if looked after properly

Fancy trying flower-drying yourself?

· Want to dry a special bouquet? Fully-matured flowers are likely to lose all their petals in the drying process, so don’t wait until the end of its life to dry it.

· To air-dry flowers, cut down stems to around eight inches, remove them from direct sunlight, remove excess foliage and leaves

· Group flowers into small bundles or leave them as individual blooms. Use string or dental floss to hang flowers upside-down in cool, dark, dry, indoor spot.

· Space out the blooms so that air circulates around each bundle. It may take weeks – or even months – for the flowers to dry, depending on conditions and the type of flowers.

· Remember: lighter flowers tend to dry even lighter and darker flowers even darker