Nigella is also called Love-in-a-Mist and makes a great dried flower
Love in a Mist is a versatile plant, with the flowers and seed pods both being suitable for floristry use once dried.
Nigella damascena dried flowers
The botanical name of Love in a Mist is Nigella damascena which comes in beautiful shades of clear blue, purple and white. True blues are hard to come by in horticulture, so a good sky blue is always good to find. The flowers are almost hidden amidst ferny foliage, hence the common name.
I experimented with drying Nigella flowers recently and found that fully opened flowers tended to be a bit droppy, but newly opened flowers and buds dried well and kept their colour. I bought some fresh flowers from a UK grower so didn’t have much control over how open they were, but if you’re growing them at home, it provides a chance to select flowers at just the right moment! The main image at the top of this page shows what a great colour they can be when commercially dried. Read more about how to dry flowers.
Love in a Mist dry seed pods
The seed pods of Nigella damascena look like little balloons a few centimetres across which dry in natural shades of green and purple, sometimes green with purple stripes! I tried drying Nigella pods a while back, which I had grown from seed.
Nigella dried seed heads in floristry
The seed heads are a great way of separating coloured blooms in a bouquet or arrangement without using foliage which might reduce the level of interest. The blue dried flower bouquet shown below was made using only UK grown stems: blue Delphiniums, purple marjoram, wheat and nigella pods. The nigella pods were green with a little natural purple which helped tie them into the colour scheme.
Nigella orientalis dry seed pods
This is a different species of Nigella, which again has interesting seed heads. The flowers of this plant are yellow, and it is commonly known as fennel flower. The stems tend to dry to a light brown or khaki to olive green and the fluted nature of the seed heads adds structural interest to an arrangement.
Shopping for dried Nigella stems
We stock all of the above seasonally in my dried flowers shop Daisy Gifts Ltd. The most popular dried flower bunch is UK grown green Love in a Mist seed pods with a hint of purple (used in the bouquet shown above) – see below: