Keeping Your Wedding Flowers Afterwards: A Care Guide

By Lauren Baynes, Website Content at Bouquet Cards

The day is over, the cake is in somebody's fridge, and there is a bouquet on a kitchen worktop still half wrapped in cellophane. This is the point where nearly every couple asks the same question, usually a day or two later than they should have: can I keep this?

Most of the time, yes. What you can keep, and how it will look in five years, depends almost entirely on the first few days. This guide is for the person holding the flowers after the wedding rather than the person planning it.

The first two or three days decide most of it

Flowers do not wait for you to have a free afternoon. Whatever you plan to do with the bouquet, do these three things as soon as you get home.

Get them out of the wrapping

Cellophane traps warmth and damp, and a bouquet left in it overnight after a long day in a marquee can go soft or start to spot. Unwrap it, take off any ribbon binding the stems tightly, and give it air somewhere cool and shaded. If your flowers were fresh, stand them in clean water while you decide. The boot of a car in summer is the fastest way to lose a bouquet, and a warm hotel room is not much better.

Take the photographs now

Whatever you do next, the bouquet will change. Photograph it from a few angles on a plain background while it still looks the way it did on the day. It is the one part of the keepsake that never fades.

Decide roughly what you want

You do not need a finished plan, but you do need a direction. Keeping it whole in a vase, breaking it into framed pieces and sending it away to be professionally preserved are three different jobs, and choosing early saves you undoing work later.

Keeping a dried bouquet and drying a fresh one are not the same job

People use "preserving the flowers" for both, and they are different tasks with different outcomes.

If you carried dried flowers

You already have the keepsake. Nothing needs doing beyond taking off the tight binding, straightening anything squashed, and standing it somewhere sensible. A dried bouquet that has been through a wedding day usually has casualties: a snapped stem, a bald patch where it was held, some shedding. That is normal, and it is fixable by turning the tidy face outwards.

If you carried fresh flowers

You have a decision and a short window. Fresh flowers can be air dried at home, pressed, or sent to a professional preserver who freeze dries them and sets them in a case or a block. Home drying is free and gives you something honest and rustic. Professional preservation holds far more of the original shape and colour, and costs accordingly. Neither is wrong, but pick one within a couple of days, because a bouquet that has already started to go over will not improve with drying.

Drying a fresh bouquet at home

The method is simple and the mistakes are all about patience and airflow.

• Take the bouquet apart. Dried as one dense bundle it traps damp in the middle and you get mould rather than a keepsake.
• Strip the lower leaves and tie the stems into small bunches with an elastic band, which tightens as they shrink.
• Hang them upside down somewhere dark, dry and airy. An airing cupboard or a spare wardrobe works. A bright windowsill does not.
• Leave them alone. Depending on stem thickness and how warm the room is, this takes a couple of weeks or more.
• Accept that some things will not survive. Thick, water heavy heads often collapse. Firmer, smaller headed flowers and foliage hold up much better.

Rebuild the bouquet once everything is properly dry, not before. Half dried stems packed together will go musty.

What it will honestly look like in five years

This part tends to get glossed over. A kept wedding bouquet does not stay the colour it was. Whites go soft cream and then a deeper ivory. Pinks and lilacs quieten first, often within the first year. Reds and deep burgundies darken. Greens fade towards a dusty sage. Anything that was dyed will drift.

None of that means you have done something wrong. It is what dried plant material does, and an old bouquet that has settled into warm neutrals has its own character. What you should not expect is a piece identical to the photographs. If exact colour matters a great deal to you, that is an argument for professional freeze drying, or for framing a photograph alongside the flowers so both versions are there.

Expect a slow loss of material too. Small heads drop and seed heads shed, and after several years a bouquet is thinner than it started. Standing it on a tray catches that.

Living with a bouquet you have kept

A keepsake gets handled far more than an ordinary arrangement, which is where most damage happens. A few things help.

• Pick a spot away from a south facing window. Strong light bleaches a kept bouquet faster than anything else in the house.
• Keep it off a mantelpiece above a working fire and away from radiators, which make old stems brittle.
• Put it under glass if you can. A cloche or a deep frame keeps the dust off and stops people picking it up, and a covered piece needs almost no looking after.
• If it is out in the open, turn it a quarter every few months so one side is not always facing the light.
• Move it by the vase or the base, never by the stems.

If you would rather it sat in the room as decoration than as a museum piece, our guide on how to style dried flowers at home covers placement in more detail.

Splitting one bouquet into several keepsakes

A whole bouquet is one object in one house. Broken up it becomes several, and each piece tends to survive better for being smaller and easier to protect.

• A few stems in a deep box frame for the wall, with the order of service or a photograph.
• Small posies for each set of parents, or for anyone who could not be at the wedding.
• Pressed petals under glass, which suits flat flowers far better than round ones.
• One stem framed on its own for an anniversary.
• The buttonhole and a scrap of ribbon in a shallow case beside the bouquet.

If you are going to split it, do it while everything is dry and before age makes it fragile. Cutting into a bouquet that is ten years old tends to end badly.

When a piece is past saving

Sometimes it has gone. A bouquet that has been damp, smells musty or crumbles when you lift it is not coming back, and putting it under glass only traps the problem.

You do not have to keep it out of loyalty. Photograph it one last time, take out anything still sound even if that is three stems, and frame those. Then compost the rest, which dried plant material takes to perfectly well. Some people keep a handful of petals in a box, or scatter them somewhere that meant something. It is a better ending than a tired arrangement on a shelf that nobody wants to be the one to throw away.

If the wedding has not happened yet

Two decisions made early make keeping the flowers far easier later.

The first is what the bouquet is made from. If you already know you want to keep it, a dried bouquet arrives as the keepsake and nothing has to be rescued afterwards. If you want fresh on the day, our florists at The Petal Boutique in Winchester, Astrid, Helen and Gemma, have well over eighty years behind the bench between them and can tell you which fresh flowers dry well and which do not. That conversation changes what you end up with.

The second is who is taking the flowers home. Bouquets get left in venues or put in a car boot at midnight. Give the job to one person who is not you, and tell them to unwrap it and leave it somewhere cool. It is the least glamorous part of wedding planning, and the reason some couples still have their flowers years later and others do not.