Re-Purposing Dried Plants In Fire-Starting Bouquets

By Annie Corrigan

Published October 29, 2019 at 5:24 PM EDT

It's a gorgeous December morning in southern Indiana, unseasonably warm in fact.

Mary Lu Orr is enjoying the sun out on the porch where she's surrounded by bunches and bunches of dried plants, flowers and herbs. She assembling some fire-starting bouquets that will decorate the living room and then eventually be tossed into the fire to keep the flame going.

"All these things are still useful but aren't prime and you just hate to throw them in the compost," she says.

Fire-Starting Bouquets

She begins by laying down a paper bag she's cut in half. Next, it's a sheet of the Financial Times, which she uses because she likes the pink paper on which it's printed.

Then she gets creative combining Russian sage with sunflower heads, oregano with blackberry lilies, and finishing the bouquet off with some prickly teasel.

Now fold it up like your local florist would do, snugly wrapping the papers around the plants. It can't be too snug because the bouquet needs to fit into a skinny wine bag. Wrapping twine around the bouquet will help compress it.

And finally, you now have a use for all those old ribbons and bows from holidays gone by: decorate the bouquet with a colorful ribbon.

This bouquet will make your house feel like an expansive field of flowers once it's tossed into a fire. But your home doesn't need to have a fireplace to benefit from one of these bouquets: they look and smell beautiful all on their own.