We sell artificial flowers, so you would expect this to be one-sided. It isn't. We have fresh flowers on the kitchen table most weeks and dried grasses in the bedroom. The question is not which is best, but which is best where.
Fresh
Wins on: scent, the pleasure of buying them, the kitchen table and anywhere you sit close to them.
Loses on: cost over time, and anywhere you don't look at them daily. A supermarket bunch at £6 a week is over £300 a year; a florist's arrangement every fortnight is nearer £900.
Dried
Wins on: texture, pampas and grasses, a certain kind of pale room.
Loses on: colour (everything goes to beige eventually), dust, fragility, and children or cats. Dried hydrangea crumbles if you look at it hard.
Faux
Wins on: the hallway, the mantel, the guest room, anywhere that gets no water and little attention. Colour that stays put through a season. Statement arrangements that would cost £150 fresh and last four days.
Loses on: scent, and on cheap stems, which look exactly like what they are. The gap between a £3 stem and a £12 stem is the whole difference.
What we actually do
- Kitchen table: fresh, whatever is cheap that week, in a jug.
- Hallway console: faux, changed four times a year.
- Mantel: faux, with a candle for the scent fresh flowers would have given.
- Bedroom: dried grasses in a tall vase, replaced once a year.
- Christmas: faux throughout. Fresh garland drops; faux goes back in the box.
The cost over a year
One of our arrangements at around £90, with the stems swapped seasonally for £30 to £40 a time, comes to roughly £200 a year for a hallway that always looks dressed. The equivalent in fresh flowers, if you kept it up, is four to five times that.
Buy fresh for the table. Buy faux for the rooms that don't get looked after. And if you buy faux, buy good faux, shape the stems, and follow the seven rules.