Dried flowers of Kangaroo Paw
The exotic bloom Kangaroo Paw is also known as Anigozanthos. The plant is native to Australia and is the emblem of Western Australia. You can see how it gets its common name from the shape! Its most common colour is dark burgundy red, but I’ve also seen it grown for floristry here in Europe in pale pink, silvery white and yellow. The little trumpets are about three centimetres long held a few to a stem. Please note that these blooms are known to cause skin irritation or an allergic reaction in some people.
Drying Kangaroo Paw
I found Anigozanthos easy to dry using the usual method of hanging up in a warm, dry, dark place with good air circulation. The resulting stems were nice and sturdy although the bloom is a little delicate where it joins the stem. Each stem carries multiple blossoms, so I found that losing one or two on drying wasn’t really a problem.
I no longer dry these flowers because although they’re beautiful, they’re covered in tiny flock-like hairs. The hairs cover the stems and the blooms themselves, as you can see in the pic below. I think that once desiccated these might become brittle and more likely to break away, increasing the chance of a skin reaction.
Read about another exotic plant which dries well – Leonotis
Read about making dried flowers in my workshop