Gomphrena Flowers: Cutting Stems and Drying Them for a Year

The heads are bracts, and that is why they last

What looks like a small round clover-like flower on a gomphrena is not really a flower in the usual sense. The color comes from stiff papery bracts packed into a globe, with the true flowers tiny and almost invisible between them. Bracts have very little water in them to begin with, so where an ordinary petal wilts, browns and drops, a gomphrena head simply stays as it is. On the plant a single head stays presentable for six to eight weeks.

This is the whole reason to grow the plant. It means the display in the garden does not need deadheading to look tidy, it means the heads survive heat that flattens everything else, and above all it means that cutting and hanging them produces a dried flower that holds its shape and color for a year or more rather than fading to beige in a month. Very few garden plants dry that well, and none of them do it with this little effort.

Flowering runs continuously from about eight to ten weeks after sowing right through until frost, with no gap and no need to cut back for a second flush. In a long hot season a single plant will produce heads for four months.

Cut at the right stage or the color goes

Timing the cut is the one skill involved, and it is not difficult. A head is ready when it is fully colored and firm, feels dry and papery when you squeeze it gently, and has not yet started pushing out the tiny yellow true flowers from around its base. Cut at that point and the color sets and holds. Cut too late, once the little flowers have opened all round the head, and the bracts will shatter and drop when they dry.

Cut too early, while the head is still small and soft with the color not fully developed, and it shrinks as it dries into a dull undersized knot. The window between too early and too late is around a week in warm weather, so a walk down the row every three or four days catches everything at the right moment.

Take the stems long. Follow the stem down to the next pair of leaves or a junction with a strong side shoot and cut there, which usually gives you 10 to 16 inches (25 to 40 cm). Cutting deep forces the regrowth to come long as well, and short cutting trains the plant to make short stems, which are useless for a dried bunch. Cut in the morning once the dew has burned off and the plant is at its most turgid, never in the middle of a hot afternoon when it is already stressed.

Do not cut wet. A head cut with rain or dew on it dries slowly, and slow drying is what causes the brown speckling that ruins an otherwise perfect bunch.

Hanging and drying: the whole method

Drying gomphrena is genuinely as simple as hanging it upside down. Strip every leaf off the stem first, because leaves hold far more water than the heads do, dry into brown crumbs and are the main source of mold in a bunch. Then gather ten to fifteen stems, bind the base with a rubber band rather than string, and hang the bunch head down somewhere warm, dark and airy.

A rubber band matters more than it sounds. Stems shrink noticeably as they dry, and a bunch tied with string simply falls out of its own knot after a week. Darkness matters too: the color in the bracts is stable but not immune, and a bunch dried in a sunny window will be a shade or two paler than the same bunch dried in a cupboard. Air movement is the third element, and a still humid room is what turns a bunch moldy.

Two to three weeks in reasonable conditions and the stems snap rather than bend, which is the test for done. Once dry, keep the bunches out of direct sunlight and away from damp. Displayed in an ordinary room they hold good color for a year, and often two, gradually softening rather than collapsing. Heads that get damp again in a humid room go floppy and never firm up properly, so a bathroom is the one place not to put them.

1. Strip every leaf from the stem Run your fingers down the stem and pull all the foliage off before bundling. Leaves hold water, dry to brown crumbs and are the usual cause of mold inside a bunch.
2. Bundle 10 to 15 stems with a rubber band Keep the bunches small so air reaches the middle. Use a rubber band, not string, because the stems shrink as they dry and a tied bunch drops out of its knot.
3. Hang upside down in the dark Head down in a warm, dark, airy place such as an attic, a garage or a cupboard with the door left ajar. Upside down keeps the stems straight as they stiffen.
4. Wait two to three weeks and test a stem It is done when a stem snaps cleanly rather than bending. Bringing bunches out early leaves moisture in the stem, which browns the base of the head later.
5. Store or display out of sunlight Keep finished bunches away from direct sun and damp air. In an ordinary dry room they hold color for a year or more, softening slowly rather than shattering.

When it will not flower

A gomphrena that has stopped producing heads almost always has one of three causes, and feeding is the right answer to none of them. Work through them in order before you reach for anything in a bottle.

Shade is by far the commonest. Under six hours of direct sun the plant grows tall and thin, leans, and puts out a fraction of the heads. Nothing done to the soil corrects it, so either move the plant or accept a reduced display and site the next batch better. The second cause is richness: a large dark leafy plant with almost no heads has been fed too well, and the fix is to stop feeding entirely and cut back on water, both of which take a few weeks to show.

The third is simply cold. Gomphrena more or less stops in a cool spell and resumes when heat returns, and there is nothing wrong with a plant that has paused in a fortnight of chilly damp weather. If you have sun, lean soil and warmth and it still will not flower, look at the roots: a plant in a pot that has filled its root run flowers poorly and wilts every afternoon, and it needs a bigger container rather than more water.

Record the date of the first head, the date you started cutting for drying, and how many stems each plant gave over the season. That last number is what tells you how many plants to grow next year for the bunches you actually want.