Honesty for flower arranging

Honesty is not the most attractive plant when it is growing. It's a biennial, which means it takes two years to complete its life cycle of growing, flowering and producing seeds. For the entire 15 months it was in the garden (it started in spring one year and completed its cycle in summer the next year), my husband complained that I had planted a weed. Here it is with its little serrated-edged heart-shaped leaves looking like a weed as a seedling:

Here it is at its absolute peak:

Here it is in May after it has flowered and started producing seed heads. Its leaves look a bit like nettles and its flowers are light-pink and look like weeds. I didn't think to take a photo of it when it started flowering before the seed heads appeared, but it didn't look any more attractive.

  It looks even worse from a distance:

However, looking like a weed comes with the advantage that it also grows like a weed. It's prepared to grow absolutely anywhere, even in areas with barely any soil that are always in shade. And it is worth growing at least as a once-off, so that you can use its seed heads as dried flowers. To do this, you need to leave it growing in the ground until the plant dies and dries out and all the leaves have fallen off. I harvested mine in early August this year. I had picked a couple of stems earlier because they were in the way of the shed door, but they went mouldy rather than drying out nicely. It may be possible to pick the stems earlier, but if you do, you'll need somewhere nice and dry to store them.

When you harvest it, you next need to remove the dull beige outsides of the seed head to reveal the shimmering moon-like interior. I found that the best way to do this was to bend the seed head near to where it joins the stalk of the plant. This released the outer skin of one side, which you could then just peel off. You need to do the same for both sides of the seed head, as there is an outer skin on both sides.

You can then arrange these in a vase like you would arrange any other flowers, only without water and they will shimmer in the sunlight.

How big your display of flowers will be depends on how big the plant grew and much you've picked. Some of my plants grew more than a metre tall. Ideally remove any snails you see on them, as the snails eat the seed heads as well as the leaves, leaving the dried plant less attractive