“Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.”

Ever thought about flower pressing as a hobby? Trust me, the results can brighten up your home and life. More and more people are using pressed flowers as decorative additions to scrapbooks and as handmade gifts.

Here’s some good news — the forgotten hobby of flower pressing is back! According to The Telegraph, the art of pressing flowers, once beloved of Victorian ladies, is on the rise again. It involves drying flowers and flattening or pressing their petals and leaves. An outdoorsy pastime and a method of recording natural history, pressing flowers is the perfect craft for today, combining time spent outdoors with a little bit of patience and seemingly infinite creative variations.

The art of pressing flowers to form decorative images actually dates back to the 1500’s and is called Oshibana. It uses pressed flowers, petals, and other plants to create a detailed picture. Through an interaction between Japan and Europe, Oshibana became a popular art in the Victorian era.

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The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants (the Glass Flowers) is a collection of realistic glass botanical models at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Commissioned by Harvard to introduce botany students to the beauty and complexity of the plant kingdom, it was created by glass artisans Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a Czech father-son team, from 1887 to 1936. This collection of over 4,300 models representing more than 780 plant species, includes 847 life-size models and 3,000 detail models of plant parts and anatomical sections. Each corolla, leaf, stamen, fruit pod, hair, vein, bracht and petal was handmade by the artists, who moulded glass warmed by a heat lamp with ordinary pincers and tweezers and created each groove and line with a needle. The Glass Flowers are viewed by more than 210,000 visitors annually.

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True blue flowers are rare in nature, occurring only in select species like morning glories and delphiniums. According to the Royal Horticultural Society’s colour scale, most “blues” are really violet or purple.

Now, after 13 years Japanese scientists have created a genuinely blue chrysanthemum. This could be applied to other species and could mean that florists will no longer have to dye flowers.

True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins — pigment molecules in the petals, stem and fruit — consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple or blue depending on what sugars or groups of atoms are attached.

Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, first put a gene from a bluish flower called the Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene’s protein modified the chrysanthemum’s anthocyanin to make the bloom purple. A second gene from the blue-flowering butterfly pea was then added. This gene’s protein added a sugar molecule to the anthocyanin which turned the flowers blue. The two-step method was unexpected as the scientists believed multiple genes were required in a more complicated process. Chemical analyses showed that the blue colour came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colourless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue colour.

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Sell expressions of love, friendship, congratulations and condolence. Filling rooms with colour and fragrance won’t be your only satisfaction. Running a successful business as a floral designer means you’ll have flexibility, a decent income and the chance to call your own shots.

The work

Flowers are important for all of us. They play an important role in the life span of individuals marking important occasions and events from birth to death.

Floral designers plan and prepare floral decorations, arrangements and gift items for customers. They select flowers, containers and ribbons and arrange them into bouquets, centrepieces of tables, wreaths, and all floral decorations required for weddings, funerals, holidays and other special occasions. Floral designers are also known to use accessories such as balloons, fruits, feathers, candles, toys, candy, and gift baskets as part of their displays.

When creating floral arrangements with live plants, floral designers must make sure that the plants get enough water to stay alive and healthy. In order to do this, most designers choose to use a substance known as floral foam. Working with dried flowers and plants has its own challenges as well. For instance, dried flowers and plant stems are usually very brittle, and they must be handled with care.

This profession also requires you to create your own niche. This comes with providing what others haven’t thought of and hence constantly reinventing in this trade can have huge payoffs.

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