Wedding Bouquet Preservation

Preserve your cherished flowers for years of enjoyment with Essex Florist Flower Preservation.  

Now you can treasure your special flowers in a custom keepsake or frame of your own creation.

How It Works

As much as it is an art form, flower preservation is also a science. It is labor intensive and time consuming. But so worth the effort!!!! When done properly, your floral keepsakes will last many years.

We get asked all the time about how to dry flowers. There are several methods. The most common and least expensive is air drying. You can do this yourself at home by hanging your flowers upside down in a dry environment. Of all the possible methods, this produces the least favorable results. Flowers that are air dried are brittle and shatter easily. The same is true for flowers that are pressed between the pages of a book.

Commercially, most professionals rely on one of two processes: silica gel or freeze drying. Both methods produce excellent results; however, with silica gel, your flowers begin the drying process the same day you bring them into our shop. With freeze drying, your flowers are placed in a freezer and are held until the freeze-drying machine is available. That is why the wait can be 6 to 8 months for a keepsake to be completed.

With silica gel there is no waiting. Really, why should you have to wait 6 to 8 months for your flowers to be preserved?

We work with a very fine commercial grade silica gel that is manufactured to very specific standards. This is not the same silica gel that you might find in your local craft store.

The Process

Flower preservation is a two-step process:

1. Step One is the drying process, where your flowers are pre-treated, and placed in our drying trays for several weeks. When they come out of the drying trays, each flower is individually cleaned and prepared for for preservation and framing!
2. Step Two is the creation of your keepsake.  It is important to have decided on your keepsake prior to your flowers coming out of our drying trays.  We take the flowers out of the our drying trays and apply additional coats of sealant to your flowers.  We also, where appropriate, use floral tints to enhance the colors of your flowers. Then we carefully assemble your keepsake.  Once complete, we coat your final design with a last coat of sealant and we seal the frame so that your final product is air tight.