Lost & found
Bring some love into your home this season with dried plants and second-hand treasures.
WORDS AND STYLING Tara Sloggett PHOTOGRAPHY Warren Heath
The past year’s events have seen us spending more time at home and in nature, shifting our focus towards a greater appreciation for the world around us. Combine the two, and you have something really special. Bring the rawness and innocence of nature into your home with delicate dried specimens, pods, flowers and grasses and feed your soul by choosing to re-love furniture cast aside by others.
ABANDONED TREASURES
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as creating something beautiful that costs virtually nothing. Grasses and dried bushes, fallen pine cones or twigs picked up whilst out on a walk can be transformed with little know-how. You can even extend the life of your shop-bought flowers by using dried hydrangeas and eucalyptus.
With foraged finds, always be conscious of where you’re foraging. Only forage where there is plenty of everything. Always have a pair of good secateurs with you.
DISPLAYING AT HOME
With beauty and form in the simplest, most subtle of ways, single stems displayed together can look elegantly striking. Think about creating different heights and textures with a subtle underlying arrangement. The secret to keeping them standing upright is to use a flower frog, a tiny weighted surface of spikes that secures stems in place. For dried flowers, just push them into place and you have an instant display, and if you prefer a more finished look, you can disguise the flower frog by placing it in a pretty dish. For fresh flowers, just add water.
Hanging installations are very much on-trend, and although they look too tricky to handle, they’re actually very simple.
Create a basic structure by making a hollow sausage shape out of chicken wire and secure the shape with the wire itself or with cable ties (you’ll need some wire cutters for this). This creates a ‘housing’ to poke your dried pieces through. It’s easier to create your floral piece whilst it’s hanging, so tie fishing gut on each end to hang, (the fishing gut will make it look like it’s floating in the air).
Start feeding through your dried flowers. Favourites are often dried hydrangeas, grasses and dried eucalyptus. Poke them through, taking time to build up layers and once you’re happy, tidy up the ends by cutting with secateurs.
Fill in any gaps with additional dried pieces or flower heads and secure any stems with clear cable ties or twine if needed. If your piece is only seen front on you won’t need to worry about the back, but if you can walk around it, then make sure it looks fabulous all the way around.
