Waxflower, Statice and the Everlastings

There is a group of flowers whose defining property is that they refuse to die properly. They do not wilt, collapse and go brown the way a tulip does. They dry standing in the vase, hold their colour, and carry on looking more or less the same for months. In the trade they are the everlastings, and they are simultaneously the most useful and the most abused material in a florist's cooler.

The cast

• Waxflower (Chamelaucium uncinatum) — Australian, needle-fine foliage, sprays of small five-petalled flowers with a waxy sheen, in white, blush, pink, magenta and purple. Three weeks fresh. Highly aromatic — a clean eucalyptus-lemon note that some people love and some find medicinal.
• Statice (Limonium sinuatum) — winged stems topped with papery clusters in purple, blue, white, yellow, apricot and pink. Dries essentially without changing. Three weeks fresh, indefinite dried.
• Limonium / sea lavender — the cloud-like airy cousin, tiny lilac-white flowers on branching stems. The finest filler available and easy to over-apply.
• Strawflower (Xerochrysum) — stiff papery petals that genuinely feel like straw and open and close with humidity. Extraordinary colours: bronze, apricot, rust, cream.
• Gomphrena — small papery clover-heads in magenta, white and lilac.
• Achillea (yarrow) — flat plates of tiny flowers, mustard, cream and rust. Excellent dried, structurally useful fresh.
• Craspedia — the yellow spheres on bare stems. Immortal.
• Lavender — the everlasting most people already own without thinking of it as one.

What they are actually for

Three legitimate jobs.

Structure and airiness. A hand-tied bouquet made entirely of round-headed flowers looks like a bowling ball. Waxflower and limonium supply the fine, branching, semi-transparent material that gives an arrangement edges and lets light through it. Without something in this family, most bouquets look denser and cheaper than they are.

Longevity insurance. In a mixed arrangement they outlive everything else by a wide margin. When the roses go on day nine, an arrangement with a good everlasting backbone still has a shape. You pull the spent stems and what remains is a smaller, drier, still-attractive thing rather than a vase of sticks.

Deliberate drying. Hang statice, strawflower, achillea, gomphrena or lavender upside down in a dark, dry, airy spot for two to three weeks and you have permanent material with almost no colour loss. This is the easiest preservation in floristry — no silica, no press, no equipment.

Why they have a bad reputation

Because of the supermarket bunch. For thirty years, statice and limonium have been the material used to pad a cheap bouquet to look bigger — six carnations, three chrysanthemums and an enormous quantity of purple statice, wrapped in cellophane. That is a real thing and it did real damage to the reputation of a genuinely good flower.

The distinction is proportion and intent. Statice used as one-third of the volume to make a small bouquet look large is padding. Statice used as ten percent, in a single considered colour, next to material that can hold its own, is design. The flower is not the problem.

The current market has largely re-learned this, and waxflower in particular has moved from filler to feature — a bunch of deep magenta waxflower on its own, in a simple vessel, is a genuinely handsome thing.

Handling

Woody stems: cut at a sharp angle and give them a deep first drink. Waxflower drops its tiny leaves and spent flowers steadily, which is a real consideration on a dining table — it sheds a small amount every day, indefinitely.

Waxflower is also ethylene-sensitive. Keep it away from ripening fruit, and be aware that a bowl of apples on the same table will accelerate floret drop noticeably within a couple of days.

Statice fouls water faster than its appearance suggests, and its water develops a distinctly unpleasant smell if left. Change it every two or three days, or — better — recognise the moment the arrangement is really finished, pull the everlastings out, and hang them to dry rather than composting them.

The transition trick

The most underused move with this material is planned obsolescence in reverse. Order an arrangement that contains a meaningful proportion of everlastings. Enjoy it fresh for ten days. When the perishable flowers are done, lift out the statice, strawflower and craspedia, tie them, and hang them in a wardrobe. Three weeks later you have a dried arrangement that came free with the fresh one and will sit on a shelf for a year.

It is the closest thing in flowers to getting two purchases from one, and almost nobody does it because nobody mentions that it is possible.

Our Wildflower Garden Bouquet and Purple and Lavender Collection both carry enough of this material to make the trick work, and the Preserved Flower Dome is the finished version for anyone who would rather skip the fresh stage entirely. For an arrangement built deliberately around long-hold material, ask for it through the Designer Flower Mix — it is a specification most people never think to make and one we are always glad to get.