How to Take Apart a Flower Bouquet for Preservation

Learn how to take apart a flower bouquet for preservation in this video with professional preservationist Carol Macht.

This is Carol Macht from Forever Yours in Glen Burnie, Maryland. And I’m here with Carol George. We have a beautiful bridal bouquet that we’re going to be preserving. And we’ll show you how to preserve your bridal bouquet. First of all, we’re going to take a photo of this bouquet because you want to remember what it look like after you take it apart. And typically, we take a photo off the top of the bouquet. Get a nice picture of the head and then we would take a picture of the stems because usually the wrap on the stems is special and you want to have a nice photo of that, and how to put it back together again. Carol is going to be taking the bouquet apart gently and wrapping the stems first and then taking each flower apart, and you don’t have to wait with us while we do that. Now, that we have the bridal bouquet separated, we can start preparing the bouquet to actually put in the silica gel. What we’re going to need is some florist wire, wire cutters and some snips. You’re going to be cutting the flower about a quarter to half an inch away from the actual top of the flower, keeping the stems because we’re going to use the stems again later. Cut approximately three inches of wire and then you’re going to take the wire and poke it into the back of the flower until it’s firmly in the hip of a rose. In this case, and fold it up. You’ll see why we need to fold it up a bit later. I’m going to take two of the roses and do that with those two and then we’ll finish this up. The greens don’t have to be separately wired, with each head of a flower is separately wired, and you’ll see that we have here the corsage pins that we’re going to be used to put back of the bouquet and each of the stems. Stems are treated differently. And in our segment, we’re going to show you how to sink the flowers or air-dry them.