On chilly cold days, I really want to return to summer. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to hot countries, but it is possible to plunge into the world of sun, warmth and bright colors with the help of winter bouquets. Compositions of fragrant herbs and flowers, red lacquer berries, cereals, cones and fancy twigs will warm the soul and harmoniously fit into the interior of the house, creating a special comfort.
Dried flowers are good for winter bouquets: all types of thorns, seed pods of poppy, peonies, ash trees, ornamental garden barley, blueheads. Dried flowers do not require special drying, just put them in a vase.
From garden plants, physalis with its recognizable orange lanterns is usually used for making bouquets. Among others, the composition includes perennial gypsophila and lunaria.
Variants with marsh grasses - cattail and cotton grass of reed look original. Cattail looks great not only as an independent bouquet, but also in company with other plants. The collected herbs are dried upside-down, arrow down, in a cool place.
It is better to cut branches of trees and shrubs before the end of July. They are easily stored throughout the winter. For greater decorativeness, the leaves on the branches are treated with a glycerin mixture so that they do not lose their elasticity and do not break. The solution is prepared at the rate of 1 part of glycerin to 2 parts of water, after which branches are placed in it, from time to time updating the sections.
Berry bushes are unusually beautiful: wild rose, sea buckthorn, snowberry, barberry, Siberian apple tree. To create bouquets, twigs with berries are removed during the period of the most intense color of the fruit.
Flowers for drying are harvested in dry sunny weather. Roses, violets, dahlias, peonies, chrysanthemums, sweet peas - this is a far from complete list of plants used in a winter bouquet. They are dried in different ways. Most often they just tie it up by the stem, head down one at a time, leaving in a well-ventilated place. But there is also another way. Holes are made at the bottom of the cardboard box so that the stem of the plant can pass through them, and the flower would be kept inside. The petals are laid with cotton wool or sprinkled with clean sand. A box with plants is fixed in a suspended state in a dark, ventilated place until the flowers are completely dry.
