What to Do With Wedding Flowers After the Big Day
Beyond the vase: five ways to preserve your bouquet, and why resin lasts longest.
Beyond the vase: five ways to preserve your bouquet, and why resin lasts longest.
The morning after a wedding has a particular quality. The noise and movement of the day before has settled. The dress is hanging. The cards are stacked on a surface somewhere. And on the kitchen table, or the bathroom windowsill, or wherever it was set down in the small hours, the bouquet is still there — a little looser than it was, beginning its quiet return to the world.
Most bouquets are in a vase within the first day. Most are gone within a fortnight.
This does not have to be the outcome. The flowers that were chosen specifically for that specific day — the varieties, the colours, the way the florist arranged them to suit the room and the dress and the light — can be kept. Not indefinitely in a vase, obviously. But kept, in a form that does not require daily attention or a race against time.
This article is for anyone who has looked at their bouquet and thought: there must be something better than watching these die. It covers the five most common approaches to flower preservation, what each one actually involves, and why — for those who want something that will still be beautiful in twenty years — resin is in a category of its own.
It is also worth saying, before we begin: if your wedding was not last week but last year, or three years ago, this article is still for you. The right moment to preserve your flowers is not always the moment immediately after the wedding. Sometimes it takes longer to know what you want. That is completely normal, and some approaches — though not all — remain available to you.
The options, considered honestly
One — Leave them in a vase and let them dry naturally
The simplest approach, and the most common. Flowers left in water will last a week or two before they begin to decline; taken out of water and left upright, they will dry over several weeks into something papery and faded.
The results are unpredictable. Some flowers — particularly sturdier varieties like dried grasses, protea, or certain roses — hold their shape and develop a quality that is genuinely beautiful in its own right. Others — soft petals, anything with high moisture content, flowers that were already fully open on the day — will droop, brown, and lose both their form and most of their colour.
Natural drying requires no skill and no investment. It also offers no control over the outcome, and for most bouquets, the result falls well short of what the flowers looked like on the day.
If you love the aesthetic of dried botanicals and your bouquet suits it, this can work. If you are hoping to retain something close to the original arrangement — the colours, the form, the way it looked in your hands — natural drying will likely disappoint.
Two — Pressing
Pressing is one of the oldest methods of flower preservation, and it remains one of the most beautiful — within its considerable limitations.
The process involves placing blooms between absorbent paper under weight for several weeks, after which the flattened, dried flowers can be framed, incorporated into stationery, or mounted as wall art. Done well, pressed flowers retain remarkable colour and detail. A skilled practitioner working with the right varieties can produce something genuinely lovely.
The limitation is structural: pressing is, by definition, a two-dimensional process. The three-dimensional form of the bloom — the depth of a rose, the curve of a peony, the way petals overlap — is entirely lost. What you preserve is a record of the flower, not the flower itself.
For couples who love the aesthetic of botanical illustration or pressed flower art, this is a legitimate and beautiful option. For those who want the bouquet as they remember holding it — as a shaped, substantial thing — pressing is the wrong tool.
It is also worth noting that timing matters significantly. Flowers should ideally be pressed within 24 to 48 hours of the wedding, while they retain moisture but before they begin to decay. A bouquet left in a vase for a week is not ideal pressing material.
Three — Silica gel drying
Silica gel is the white granular desiccant that comes in small sachets in shoe boxes and electronics packaging. In bulk, it is a remarkably effective tool for drying flowers quickly and with better results than air drying alone.
The process involves burying blooms in a container of silica gel for one to three weeks, during which the gel draws moisture from the petals while broadly maintaining their three-dimensional form. Colours shift — they will not be identical to the fresh flower — but the structural integrity is considerably better than natural drying, and the timescale is faster.
Silica gel drying is the method most commonly used by professional preservation studios as a preliminary step before further work — including resin encapsulation. As a standalone method, it produces attractive dried flowers with good form that can be displayed in domes, frames, or decorative arrangements.
The results are fragile. Silica-dried flowers are delicate and will not survive handling or moisture. They are display objects, not objects of use. In the right setting — a glass dome, a shadow box, a display case — they can be genuinely beautiful. In an average home with children, pets, or simply the ordinary movement of life, their longevity is limited.
Four — Freeze-drying
Freeze-drying is the most technically advanced preservation method available for flowers, and it produces the most faithful reproduction of the original bloom — the closest approximation to how the flowers looked on the day, in three dimensions and with the best colour retention of any method.
The process uses specialist equipment to remove moisture from the flowers at very low temperatures, bypassing the liquid state entirely. The result is a bloom that holds its form, its depth, and much of its colour with remarkable fidelity.
The drawbacks are practical ones. Freeze-drying requires specialist equipment that most individuals do not own and most studios do not operate — it is a service sent away rather than something done at home. It is also the most expensive preservation method, and the results, while impressive, share the fragility of other dried flower approaches. The flowers are not protected; they are simply very well preserved in their dried state, which means they remain susceptible to humidity, handling, and the passage of time.
For those who want the most faithful possible reproduction of their bouquet as a dried arrangement, freeze-drying is the gold standard. For those who want something that will be as beautiful in thirty years as it is today, there is a further step to consider.
Five — Resin encapsulation
Resin is where the conversation changes.
Every other method discussed here preserves flowers in some form — flattened, dried, frozen — and then leaves them exposed to the world. Resin does something fundamentally different: it surrounds the flowers entirely in a medium that is both optically clear and permanently protective. The flowers inside a well-made resin piece are not drying out slowly. They are not susceptible to humidity or handling. They exist in a state of genuine suspension, and they will continue to do so for decades without intervention.
The practical starting point is the same as silica gel drying — the flowers must be dried before they enter the resin, since moisture and most resin chemistries are incompatible. This means timing matters: ideally, flowers are sent to a preservation studio within 48 to 72 hours of the wedding, while they are still at their best. But it also means that a bouquet that has already been dried at home — by silica gel, by freeze-drying, or even by careful air drying — can still be encapsulated, which is why this option remains open to couples who are coming to the decision later.
What resin makes possible that no other method does is the creation of an object rather than a preserved specimen. The bouquet, or selected blooms from it, is not simply dried and displayed — it becomes the material for something made. A display block for a mantelpiece. A sculptural piece for a shelf. A jewellery dish, a desk object, a paperweight, a substantial statement piece. The resin is not incidental to the result; it is part of it, adding depth, weight, and a quality of light that the flowers alone never possessed.
This is also the method that can incorporate the most. Beyond the flowers themselves, a resin commission can hold ribbon from the bouquet, a pressed order of service, a meaningful date, a fragment of lace, a ring. It can hold table flowers from the reception as well as the bouquet. It can hold both sets of buttonholes. The brief is as wide as the relationship it is marking.
The qualities that matter when choosing a maker for resin preservation are specific: the resin used should be UV-stabilised and professional grade, since cheaper alternatives yellow within a few years. The studio should be able to explain how they dry the flowers before casting and why that method suits your varieties. They should be able to show you finished pieces in real homes, not only workshop photography. And the conversation should feel like a consultation — an exchange about what you want the piece to be — rather than a transaction.
A note on timing, for those who are reading this later
If your wedding was some time ago and you are only now considering preservation, the honest position is this: most methods become less viable as time passes. Flowers that have been sitting in a vase for three weeks are not ideal material for most approaches.
Resin, however, can work with flowers in various states — dried at home, professionally dried, or even pressed — if they have been kept reasonably well. We have worked with bouquets that arrived having been carefully stored for several months after the wedding, and produced pieces that their owners were genuinely glad to have. The result is not always identical to what a fresh bouquet would have yielded, but it can still be extraordinary.
The right first step, at any point, is a conversation. Not a commitment — just a conversation about what you have, what you want, and what might be possible.
Begin here
At Kent & Vale, every wedding flower commission begins with exactly that: a conversation about your bouquet, your day, and what you want the piece to hold.
We take a small number of commissions at any one time, and every brief receives our complete and unhurried attention. There is no obligation in the first conversation, and no standard-issue process applied regardless of what you bring to us.
If you are ready to talk — whether your wedding was last weekend or several years ago — we would be glad to hear from you.
Kent & Vale is a bespoke British atelier creating handmade resin and wood objects from our workshop in Kent, England. Every piece is made to commission, and every commission begins with a conversation.