We’ve had an email from Marisa:

A bit of a weird one for you! My MIL is redecorating her living room and that means replacing her huge collection of fake flower bouquets to match the new colour scheme. I hate fake flowers but would like to save them from landfill if possible. Any suggestions?

If the flowers aren’t too discoloured or dusty, offer them to your local charity/thrift/op shop for resale. If they are a bit too dusty for that, you could try cleaning them first – there are a variety of different ways to do it apparently, just be careful not to use hot water in case it dissolves the glue which holds them together.

As for reuses, a lot of people use smaller flowers/buds for decorating hair accessories/fascinators, or purses/bags. Larger flowers can be pulled apart for their petals and used to make a scaly (in a good, mermaid way, not a ill/reptilian way) effect for costumes or, again, as decoration for purses/bags.

Any other suggestions or specific tutorials?

(Photo by assiewin)

Just a quick post to point you in the direction of a few ideas for reusing and recycling all those Valentine’s Day gifts.

We’ve got:

• How to reuse or recycle dried fresh flowers – such as roses
• How to reuse or recycle the plastic wrapping from a bouquet
• How to reuse or recycle greetings cards
• How to reuse or recycle wrapping paper
• How to reuse or recycle chocolate boxes
• How to reuse or recycle wrappers from individual chocolates

So there are plenty of ways you can show your love for the environment after someone’s shown their love for you :)

Back in the day when John used to buy me flowers*, if possible, I would keep and dry the flowers to preserve the gift.

I’ve ended up with quite a stash of dried flowers hanging from various parts of the kitchen because I couldn’t think what to do with them once they were dried.

They are not flowers grown intending to be dried so they don’t hold their petals enough to be used in a dried flower arrangement – and I’m not really a dried flower arrangement girl anyway. I’m not really a pot pourri fan either – the cats would just try to eat it. Or poo in it.

So any non-flower-arrangement, non-pot-pourri-in-bowls reuses for dried flowers? It seems a shame to just compost them after all this time but they’re just getting knocked about in their current position.

* This isn’t a dig at him: he doesn’t buy me flowers now because I made him stop for environmental reasons. We have lots of (home-grown) plants around the house instead now.

(Photo by Christopher Rayan/StockXpert)