EVERLASTING FLOWERS.

Waipa Post, Volume 52, Issue 3705, 10 January 1936, Page 10

EVERLASTING FLOWERS.

WHEN TO PICK THEM. Of the various subjects which are classed as everlasting flowers, whose blooms may be dried for winter decoration, the helichrysums (the real French “immortelles”) are the best known and most useful. The dwarf and less well known but still very pretty acrocliniums and the pink and crimson rhodanthes may be associated with them as far as the method of preserving is concerned. The great thing with these everlastings is to cut them while yet they are in bud form and before the flowers have expanded enough to show the yellow centres. Everyone of those yellow centres will turn black in the drying and, moreover, they become a mere harbourage for insects. It is necessary, therefore, to pick the moment for gathering when the maximum number of flower buds have been produced on the sprays. There will be some open flowers of course, but these should not be used. You cut with long stalks and tie the sprays up in handful bunches. Then you hang the bunches head downward in a dry, airy shed. They should not be laid on a shelf or the soft stalks of the flowers will not dry straight. Your properly dried everlastings will then have no flowers with open centres and they will have long stiff stalks, which will facilitate artistic arrangement presently. The flowers of the annual forms of statice such as suworowi and sinuata (the large flowered sea lavender) in its various delightful colours may be cut and dried in similar fashion as soon as the majority of the flowers are fully expanded. There is no danger of yellow centres in their case, and when dried they are particularly effective for winter decoration indoors.