Did you know that 80% of the flowers in cut flower arrangements in the US actually come from outside the US? We understand the need to source our food locally. For the last year, Trevor and I have been discussing ideas to source our flowers locally.

We want to source flowers locally for all the same reasons we subscribe to CSA’s for our fruit, vegetables, and eggs. As fewer flowers are flown across the ocean, the carbon footprint is reduced. By incorporating organic growing practices, local flower farmers focus on healthy living soil, not chemicals. As family owned and operated farms, they add to the local economy. In addition, by supporting them we help them survive and thrive! Sourcing locally also means less time being transported. This translates to more time in your vase!

We are researching local organic flower farms. Our hope is to incorporate local flowers into our arrangements this summer. I’m so excited by this new adventure into sustainability practices! Local flowers—good for us, good for the farmers, good for the planet!

(photo courtesy of local flower farm, Wild Blue Farm)

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I had so much fun wandering the meadow and the tree line and taking pictures of the flowers I found. When I returned to the campsite, my fiancé, PT, asked me where I had gone. I showed him the photos I had taken. “Where did you find all those flowers?” I laughed! Like I was before working at the flower shop, PT was unaware of the wildflowers surrounding him at that very moment. Once I started pointing them out to him, of course they were obvious.

If you follow this blog, you know I’ve made it a priority to fill our yard with pollinator friendly flowers. I’ve also tried to focus on perennials so our flower beds grow fuller each year. As I’ve been buying pollinator friendly perennials, I discovered most of the plants I’m buying are yellow or purple. Initially I put it down to my love of the color purple. Once you start to notice the wildflowers around us, you might also start to notice that most of them are in shades of yellow and purple. Coincidence?

It turns out it’s not a coincidence! Bees can’t see red. Red looks black to bees. They can see yellows and oranges. But according to scientists, the most likely colors to attract bees are purple, violet and blue. My photo shoot around the meadow resulted in pictures of yellow and purple flowers, and when I researched them, of course they are all favorites of pollinators.

There’s something really peaceful about taking photos of wildflowers. First, you have to slow down enough to notice the wildflowers around us. Then you have to break away from what you’re doing to get close and focus on the unique beauty of each blossom. I have seen details of flowers through the lens of my camera that I’ve never noticed before.

As we head into Memorial Day weekend, maybe you’ll take a hike through the woods. Maybe you’ll notice the wildflowers around you. Maybe you’ll even stop and take some photos. I hope so! It’s guaranteed to feed your soul and bring a smile to your face!

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The bus McCandless used as a shelter was just outside of Denali National Park so that is the area I decided to focus on. Summers are short in Alaska, but that doesn’t deter the almost 200 species of wildflowers from making the most of the longer, warmer days. It seems every photo I see of Denali National Park has a bear, a lake, Mount Denali, and a wide expanse of meadow land covered in wild flowers. These are some of my favorites!

Jacob W. Frank, NPS

Forget Me Not

At the flower shop, we often get requests for blue flowers. My standard response is that nature doesn’t produce many true blue flowers. The only ones we stock regularly are blue hydrangeas and blue delphinium. Somehow it is no surprise that the Forget Me Not is Alaska’s official flower. Also truly blue, this flower does not lend itself to cut flower arrangements, but its striking color means you won’t likely forget seeing it.

Jacob W. Frank, NPS

Purple Mountain Saxifrage

This bright pink/purple flower reminds me of our local phlox. Like phlox, purple mountain saxifrage is one of the first flowers to emerge in the spring and loves nestling around and over rocks. Like the indomitable Alaskan natives and pioneers, this flower manages to survive and thrive under less than ideal conditions.

Jacob W. Frank, NPS

Pale Corydalis

The Denali National Park has a great photo album on its Facebook page. The title of the album is, “Wildflowers of Denali 2012.” The goal of Jacob W. Frank was to see how many unique wildflowers he could photograph in a single season. In 2012, Frank photographed 185 different kinds of wildflowers. It’s a fun photo album to scroll through. With its unique coloring and shape, the pale corydalis is probably one of my favorites!

Jacob W. Frank, NPS

Glaucous Gentian

Another color that people sometimes request is teal. Until today as I scrolled through Jacob W. Frank’s photo album, I did not know that flowers actually came in teal. The nuanced color of the glaucous gentian is gorgeous! The color reminds me of the sea. Sometimes the petals are a bright teal as if reflecting the sun. Other times the petals are dark without much of the bright green shining through, just like the sea during a storm.

Jacob W. Frank, NPS

Bluebells

Continuing on my previous blog post, I thought it would be fun to include bluebells. Evidently  bluebells are highly edible. The locals in Alaska also know it as chiming bell. It seems that most parts of our little world have a version of bluebells. The ones in Alaska are similar to the ones that you’ll find in Virginia–pink as the buds emerge and then periwinkle blue as they mature.

After all the hiking I’ve done in Virginia, if you were to blindfold me and drop me into the Virginia woods, I would know I was in Virginia just by the natural surroundings. I suspect you could blindfold any Alaskan, and as they make their way into the wild flowers of Alaska, they would know they were home.

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Dried Flower Projects

Drying the Flowers

There are three ways you can dry your flowers, depending on how you want to use them. The easiest way is to hang them upside-down in a well ventilated area. You can hang a single stem or several stems held together by twine or rubber bands.

A second way to dry flowers is to press them between absorbent paper using old books or an actual flower press. There are lots of instructional videos online showing how to do this, including this one from the University of Illinois. The best flowers for this kind of drying method are ones that don’t have a lot of bulk to them and will flatten easily. Daisies, snap dragons, black-eyed Susans, gladiolas, will all press nicely. Flowers like roses or carnations that have a bulky base do not press well.

A third way to dry flowers is using silica gel. This is a great method if you want the dried flowers to essentially look the same as the fresh flower version. You can get silica gel at any local craft store or through Amazon. Again, there are a lot of instructional videos online, including this one from MonkeySee.

Projects Using Dried Flowers

Epoxy Resin

A.K. Art & Creations

One of my good friends is a jewelry maker and just started experimenting with resin. Epoxy resin can be purchased at any local craft store or through Amazon. She has come up with gorgeous pieces from pendants to earrings. She has also created some beautiful serving trays and bowls. The resin allows her to embed different objects such as metallics, shells, and flowers.

A.K. Art & Creations

What to do when stuck at home with your children? Take a walk around the neighborhood and collect wildflowers. There are a lot of apps you can download to your phone that will identify the flower for you. Wildflowers are intrinsic to our pollinators so it’s a great opportunity to help children understand the roll pollinators play. Some wildflowers are a source of energy for hummingbirds, some food for caterpillars, and some, like milkweed, are the sole provider of shelter and a place to lay eggs for the monarch butterfly. It’s amazing what flowers you will see once you start looking for them to collect.

Preserving Bride’s Bouquets and Corsages

A lot of brides want to preserve their wedding bouquets. The two best methods for this are the hang and dry method for a vintage look or the silica gel method if you want the bouquet to look similar to the way it did on your wedding day. The stems of a bouquet are wrapped very tightly. While air and silica gel will be able to circulate between the greens and flowers on the outer-most edges of the bouquet. Air and silica gel will not be able to get between the wrapped stems. Over time, moisture at the base of the bouquet and between the stems will cause mold and deterioration.

With both methods, you will need to take the bouquet apart, dry the individual stems, and reconstruct the bouquet. While there are several local companies that preserve bouquets, it’s a fun project to do, especially when stuck at home. Just make sure to take a photo of the bouquet before you take it apart and at various points during deconstruction. These photos will help you put the bouquet back together again once the stems have dried.

You can do the same thing with your corsages from Prom or Homecoming or Daddy-Daughter Dances. If you have purchased your corsage from us, the stems are already individually wrapped with floral tape and should dry well without deconstruction. I still have my corsage from my high school Prom. I hung it upside down from my mirror the night I got home. It’s a bit brittle now so I have it in the original clam shell, but I love the vintage pink color…and of course the memories!

Memories

Another project you do with your children is more long-term. I have several copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I loved exploring nature and “adventuring” as a little girl so this was a well-loved book. One of my copies is a big heavy large print book that became my flower press when I was a little girl. I chose it because it was the heaviest book I had that wasn’t a Bible. Now the choice seems so poetic–wildflowers from my adventuring pressed into a book about adventuring. I included little notes with the flowers indicating where and when I collected them. Now I can flip through the pages of Huck Finn and relive my own adventures.

One of the first arrangements I made at Fantasy Floral included peonies. I wanted to save the peonies as a memory and because they were so full and gorgeous. I just wrapped kitchen twine around the end of the stems and hung them from the curtain rod at our sliding glass door. As the peonies dried, they did lose some color, but that’s what I like about them–the vintage color look. It gives the room a cottage feeling.

Once you have dried your flowers, the projects are endless! You are only limited by your imagination in what to do when stuck at home!

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Butterflies

According to National Geographic, “The eastern population of monarchs has declined over 80 percent, and the western population is nearly extinct, with just 3 percent of its population remaining.” There are a lot of contributing factors, but the biggest and most immediate cause is the loss of milkweed.
“Milkweed, often considered a nuisance by farmers and residents, is the lifeblood of the monarch butterfly, which uses the plant for food and breeding. But herbicides and development have wiped out milkweed across the Midwest, compromising one of the monarch’s most critical habitats,” explains an Indianapolis Star article. The article does goes on to highlight farmers who are swapping out their cash crops for milkweed. Good news!

Weeds

I was on the phone yesterday with a woman who was placing an order for flowers to celebrate the birth of a baby boy. She wanted to focus on blue and yellow and white, but she was very specific about which flowers she wanted to include in the arrangement. I mentioned salidago, also known as goldenrod. It’s a beautiful, tall, filler flower that adds gorgeous yellow color and texture to arrangements. “No salidago please. It always reminds me of a weed.” This is a common sentiment.

As I little girl, I didn’t know the difference between flowers and weeds. I remember walking to elementary school at the end of summer. I loved milkweed! It went from tall flowers that were almost eye level, to hard pods, to this wonderful angel hair filling the pods. I loved cracking open the pods and watching the silk waft away on the breeze. Now I realize I was helping mother nature sow next year’s milkweed seeds. As sometimes happens, the adult in me did not appreciate milkweed as much as the child in me did, until now. Like so many others, I considered it a weed. This week, I planted three milkweed plants in my yard and hope to plant more. I haven’t seen a monarch butterfly since my boys were little. I hope that changes soon!

Flowers

We’re always taking pictures of our arrangements at the flower shop. Once I started looking at an arrangement through the lens of a camera, I started to notice the exquisite beauty of each individual flower. This actually prompted me to start taking videos of some arrangements so I could highlight each flower. Every bride loves peonies and ranunculus. Orchids and calla lilies lend elegance and a touch of the exotic. Hydrangeas add a soft summery feeling. But it’s the wild flowers that add texture and uniqueness to an arrangement. They make arrangements fun and help to highlight the showier flowers. Yes, arrangements can be fun!

Bees

I think a lot as I drive to and from work. The other morning I was pondering what to write for the next blog post–something about flowers, of course! I was sitting at a traffic light and looked absently out the passenger window. On the side of the road was a stretch of the most beautiful wild flowers. I turned down a side street and parked to get photos. There were a lot of bees and butterflies enjoying the flowers so I had to step carefully. All of the photos above are the wild flowers I saw from my car.

As I was planting my own wild flowers last weekend, I was smiling at the full circle I had come from the little girl who loved milkweed, to the adult that thought it was just a weed, to a more understanding adult that not only loved the flower but appreciated its important place in our little world. A delicate white butterfly hovered around me the whole time I was planting–never more than 8 inches off the ground or more than a few feet from me. I like to think it was thanking me for understanding and appreciating.

“One man’s weed is another man’s flower,” ~Gloria Naylor

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