Choosing funeral flowers is emotional enough. You probably are not thinking about drying methods, moisture levels, or how a rose will look months later inside a memorial keepsake.
But if you already know you may want to preserve the flowers, a little planning helps.
Roses, carnations, delphinium, baby’s breath, chrysanthemums, and many types of greenery give you good preservation options. Dense flowers can work beautifully in resin or a dimensional display. Thin flowers and small florets often work especially well in pressed artwork. White flowers can also be preserved, but you should expect more visible color change.
The most important rule is simple. Start with healthy flowers and choose the preservation method around the flower, rather than expecting every flower to behave the same way.
That approach matters as funeral traditions continue to change. The Cremation Association of North America reported in its 2026 statistics that 62.8 percent of U.S. deaths in 2025 involved cremation, up from 57.2 percent in 2021. The National Funeral Directors Association also reported that 61.4 percent of consumers in its 2025 research were interested in exploring green funeral options, while 58.3 percent had attended a funeral at a nontraditional location. Those figures do not measure flower preservation directly. They do show that families increasingly have room to create memorial rituals and keepsakes that fit the person they are remembering.
If preserving the flowers matters to you, choose them with that second life in mind.
The Best Funeral Flowers to Choose for Preservation
The familiar flowers you see at funerals are not all equally easy to preserve.
Major sympathy flower retailers such as 1-800-Flowers currently identify lilies, roses, carnations, and orchids among common sympathy choices. That makes sense from a floral design perspective. They create strong shapes and recognizable funeral arrangements. From a preservation perspective, though, each behaves differently once moisture starts leaving the petals.
The basic science is straightforward. Flower preservation removes moisture while trying to retain as much shape, texture, and color as possible. Flowers with thin structures generally dry faster. Thick, fleshy, waxy, or tightly layered flowers need more careful handling. The University of Florida IFAS Extension notes that thicker flowers take longer to dry, while silica gel can support flowers during drying and help retain color.
Roses, carnations, delphinium, baby’s breath, and greenery
Roses.
Roses are one of the safest choices when you want a classic funeral flower that also gives a preservation artist several options. Purdue Extension lists roses as suitable for desiccant drying and pressing. It also includes roses in its flower drying guidance.
The catch is size.
A standard or garden rose contains many overlapping petals and a thick center. That gives it the dimensional look people love in funeral sprays, but it also means the bloom contains more material to dry. Large roses usually make more sense for a dimensional resin preservation or shadow box design than for whole flower pressing. Smaller spray roses give you more flexibility because they are less bulky. Bouquet Casting Co’s flower pressing guidance similarly notes that spray roses generally press more easily than large garden roses.
Deep red, burgundy, pink, orange, and other stronger rose colors also give you more room for natural color movement. White and blush roses can preserve beautifully, but they rarely dry back to exactly the same bright white or pale blush you saw at the service. Bouquet Casting Co notes that white roses commonly shift toward ivory, cream, champagne, pale yellow, or light brown during pressing.
If roses have special meaning to your family, use them. Just do not choose white roses because someone promised they will remain paper white forever. Real flowers change.
Carnations.
Carnations are an excellent practical choice for funeral flower preservation.
They are already common in sympathy arrangements, and Purdue Extension specifically lists carnations as candidates for desiccant preservation. Its current preservation publication also provides drying guidance for carnations.
Carnations have another useful quality. Their ruffled flowers create a lot of visible texture without the extremely dense center of some garden roses or peonies.
That gives a preservation artist options. A carnation can become a recognizable flower in a dimensional keepsake, or sections of the bloom can be worked into a flatter design.
Carnations also come in strong reds, pinks, purples, yellows, and other colors. When long term appearance is your priority, a stronger color gives you more tolerance for natural darkening or shifting than a pure white bloom.
Delphinium and larkspur.
Delphinium is one of the best flowers to add when you want both color and preservation flexibility.
Purdue Extension recommends desiccant drying for delphinium and specifically includes delphinium, also called larkspur in some floral contexts, in its drying guidance.
The individual florets are relatively light compared with a dense rose or peony. That makes delphinium useful for pressed memorial artwork and as smaller accents around larger flowers.
Blue and purple delphinium also solve another problem. Funeral arrangements often lean heavily on white flowers. Adding blue, purple, pink, or another stronger color creates visual contrast now and gives the preservation artist more pigment to work with later.
Natural blue flowers can still change. UF/IFAS notes that blue flowers can move toward lavender or purple as they dry. That is normal preservation behavior, not necessarily a sign that anything went wrong.
Baby’s breath.
Baby’s breath is one of the easiest fillers to justify when future preservation matters.
Purdue Extension lists baby’s breath for air drying, natural drying, and pressing. That range of suitable methods makes it unusually versatile.
It works especially well around larger focal flowers because you do not need much of it to recreate the feeling of the original arrangement. A few tiny branches can add movement and scale to a pressed flower frame, shadow box, or resin composition.
There is one expectation to set now. White baby’s breath often dries warmer. Bouquet Casting Co’s preservation guidance describes the typical pressed result as ivory or cream rather than bright white.
That softer color can look beautiful in a memorial piece. Just expect it.
Greenery.
Do not treat the greenery as filler you will automatically throw away.
Ferns, ruscus, eucalyptus style foliage, salal, ivy, and similar greenery can help a preservation artist rebuild the shape and movement of a funeral arrangement.
Purdue Extension identifies ferns, ruscus, salal, ivy, and several other foliage types as suitable for preservation through air drying, pressing, glycerin treatment, or related methods depending on the plant. The same publication notes that pressing works especially well for small flowers and ferns.
Bouquet Casting Co also reports strong results from ferns and eucalyptus in pressed work, while noting that fresh green can deepen into sage, olive, or another muted green after preservation.
Keep some greenery. A preserved memorial made entirely of isolated flower heads can lose the character of the original funeral spray. Leaves give the composition context.
White flowers.
Yes, you can preserve white funeral flowers.
No, you should not expect every white flower to remain bright white.
This is one of the most important expectations to understand before ordering a white funeral arrangement.
White roses, carnations, hydrangeas, stock, ranunculus, lilies, and other pale blooms can shift toward ivory, cream, beige, champagne, yellow, or light brown as their moisture leaves. Bouquet Casting Co identifies pale flowers as more prone to visible color shifting during pressing, and UF/IFAS explains that drying itself naturally affects floral color.
That does not make white flowers a poor choice.
White funeral flowers have strong traditional meaning, and they remain among the most recognizable sympathy flowers. The better approach is to combine white focal flowers with some stronger colors or greenery, then discuss color expectations with your preservation artist before the flowers are processed.
Bouquet Casting Co also offers color restoration for appropriate flowers when a family wants preserved blooms to appear closer to their original coloring. The company specifically identifies white, blush, pale yellow, and other lightly colored flowers as common candidates.
Lilies, orchids, and very fleshy flowers.
You do not need to avoid these flowers. You just need realistic expectations.
Purdue Extension lists lilies and orchids among flowers that can be dried with desiccant methods. That means they are absolutely preservable. Their structures, however, can be more demanding than baby’s breath, delphinium, or a small rose.
Large lilies have broad petals, prominent stamens, and a strong three dimensional shape. Orchids can have waxy, moisture heavy petals. Bouquet Casting Co’s pressing guidance classifies orchids as more difficult to press because they can brown, become translucent, or lose their original shape.
Choose lilies or orchids because they meant something to your loved one, not because they are technically easiest to preserve.
A skilled preservation artist can choose the method around them.
Plan the Funeral Arrangement With Future Preservation in Mind
You do not need to redesign the funeral around preservation.
Your first priority should still be choosing flowers that feel appropriate for the person you are honoring.
Maybe your mother loved yellow roses. Maybe your grandfather grew delphinium. Maybe white carnations have religious meaning in your family. Maybe your loved one hated formal white funeral flowers and would have wanted an arrangement full of purple, orange, and blue.
Use those flowers.
Preservation works best when the keepsake still feels connected to the person.
What you can do is give your florist one extra piece of information: you plan to preserve part of the arrangement afterward.
That changes a few useful details.
What to ask your funeral florist before the service
Ask for a few spare stems.
This may be the single most useful request you can make.
Tell the florist that you plan to preserve some of the funeral flowers and ask whether they can provide a few loose spare stems from the same order. These do not need to appear in the casket spray, standing spray, or altar arrangement. Keep them separately hydrated and protected.
Why bother?
Professional drying guidance recommends starting with material in excellent condition. UF/IFAS even advises collecting more plant material than the finished design requires because some loss during drying and arranging is normal.
A loose backup rose or carnation gives you insurance against a focal flower getting crushed during transport, damaged at the cemetery, exposed to heat, or accidentally discarded during cleanup.
Sydney Park Brown’s UF/IFAS preservation guidance gives a useful rule:
“pick flowers in perfect or near-perfect condition at early maturity, but not quite at full bloom.”
Apply that idea to your spare stems. Ask for healthy blooms with firm petals and good structure.
Ask which varieties the florist can actually get.
Seasonality matters, but commercial funeral floristry does not follow a simple garden calendar.
Availability depends on growers, wholesalers, weather, shipping, your market, the exact variety, and how much notice you provide. Large floral networks currently offer funeral and sympathy arrangements built around roses, carnations, lilies, orchids, chrysanthemums, hydrangeas, and other flowers, but that does not guarantee your florist can obtain a specific cultivar or color for your service date.
So ask directly.
Instead of saying, “I want blue flowers,” ask, “Which blue or purple flowers can you get for this date that will also be suitable for preservation?”
A florist may suggest delphinium, another available blue accent, or a different flower entirely.
Do the same with roses.
A smaller spray rose may give you better pressing options than a huge garden rose. But if the large rose carries more meaning, choose it and plan on dimensional preservation instead.
Ask for variety, not just quantity.
Suppose you have a very large standing spray made of 40 white roses.
You do not necessarily need 40 white roses for the memorial keepsake.
A preservation design often becomes more interesting when the artist has one or two focal roses, smaller flowers, greenery, and a few textural fillers to work with. Bouquet Casting Co’s memorial keepsake collection includes resin designs, pressed preservation, shadow boxes, jewelry, ornaments, bookmarks, and other formats, so different flower sizes can serve different pieces.
If several relatives want keepsakes, variety becomes even more useful.
One sibling might receive a small resin flower piece. Another may prefer a pressed display. A spouse may want the main rose preserved with a prayer card. Grandchildren may receive smaller pieces that use petals or baby’s breath.
You do not need identical flowers for every memorial to feel connected.
Ask how the arrangement is constructed.
Standing sprays, wreaths, crosses, casket sprays, baskets, and vase arrangements all handle differently after the funeral.
Floral foam, wire, tape, pins, picks, ribbon, and structural supports can make a large funeral design impressive at the service. They also mean you may need to remove individual stems carefully before preservation.
Do not tear apart a meaningful casket spray in a rush.
Take photographs first.
Photograph the entire arrangement from the front, sides, and close up. Photograph any ribbon, enclosure card, religious symbol, photo, or personalization. Then remove the individual flowers you plan to preserve.
Bouquet Casting Co’s related guide on what to do with funeral flowers after the service recommends photographing arrangements and their cards before flowers are divided, donated, or preserved. It also recommends identifying the most meaningful flowers first instead of feeling pressure to save every stem.
That is the right approach.
Save meaning, not volume.
Ask the florist not to discard unused matching flowers.
Sometimes extra stems remain after the arrangement is built.
Ask whether you can have them.
A clean, unused backup flower may reach the preservation studio in better condition than a flower that spent hours in a standing display, rode to a cemetery, sat outdoors, and then traveled home.
This recommendation follows directly from established preservation guidance that favors undamaged, well conditioned plant material.
Ask for some stronger color if the design allows it.
A traditional white and green funeral arrangement can still preserve beautifully.
But if you like the appearance of blue delphinium, red roses, pink carnations, purple flowers, or another stronger color, those accents can give the final keepsake more contrast.
UF/IFAS documents predictable color changes during drying. Reds can move toward purple or blue tones, blues can shift toward lavender, and yellows and oranges often retain strong color comparatively well. Bouquet Casting Co similarly notes that bold colors tend to give stronger pressed color retention than white, cream, blush, and other very pale shades.
Do not add color purely for preservation if it feels wrong for the service.
But when two options feel equally meaningful, color is worth considering.
For families around Philadelphia, Chester County, the Main Line, Wilmington, northern Delaware, and South Jersey, there is also a practical local advantage. Bouquet Casting Co operates from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and offers local options alongside mail in preservation. Its dedicated funeral flower preservation service accepts funeral flowers as well as prayer cards, photographs, notes, fabric, lace, cremation remains, pet tags, hair, fur, and other mementos.
For families farther away, the flowers do not need to be local. Bouquet Casting Co provides a shipping process and says its preservation orders include a shipping label, BloomSafe Insurance, and mock designs with revisions.
Match the Flower to the Right Preservation Method
There is no universal “best flower” without first answering another question.
What do you want the finished memorial to look like?
A flower that is frustrating to press can be beautiful in resin. A tiny flower that disappears inside a large dimensional block may become a perfect pressed accent. A full casket spray may be impossible to reproduce at original scale but ideal for a shadow box built from selected flowers, ribbon, and a prayer card.
Choose the final format early when you can.
Resin, pressed frames, and shadow boxes need different flowers
For resin preservation, think shape.
You usually want flowers that remain visually recognizable after drying.
Roses, carnations, small chrysanthemums, smaller dimensional blooms, and selected florets can work well because a three dimensional preservation has space to show their form.
The critical step is drying.
Fresh flowers contain moisture. Professional flower preservation removes that moisture before permanent display or casting. Purdue Extension describes moisture removal while retaining shape, color, and texture as the core goal of plant material drying.
Purdue Extension also says:
“Silica-gel is especially effective for drying delicate flowers.”
That is one reason silica based drying appears so often in professional and DIY discussions about roses and memorial flowers.
For pressed preservation, think thin.
Baby’s breath, delphinium florets, ferns, smaller flowers, individual hydrangea florets, petals, and more delicate botanical material generally translate naturally into a flat composition.
UF/IFAS explains that flat or single flowers work best for pressing, while thick or double flowers can retain moisture long enough to create problems before they fully dry.
That does not mean you cannot press a rose.
You can.
But a large rose may need to be deconstructed, pressed in sections, or represented with petals rather than flattened intact. Bouquet Casting Co makes the same distinction in its current pressing guide and recommends smaller roses or alternative preservation methods for very dense garden roses.
You can browse Bouquet Casting Co’s pressed flower preservation options when you want the flowers to become wall art rather than remain dimensional. Its current pressed frame designs include multiple sizes and layouts for sentimental florals.
For shadow boxes, think story.
A shadow box gives you depth, so you can preserve dimensional flowers without placing them inside resin. It also gives you room for the things surrounding the flowers.
That matters after a funeral.
Maybe the flower itself is only part of what you want to save.
You may have a prayer card. A piece of casket spray ribbon. A handwritten note. A photograph. A religious medal. A clipping from the memorial program. A piece of lace or fabric.
Bouquet Casting Co’s floral shadow boxes are designed for dimensional flower preservation, and its memorial service accepts several types of personal mementos alongside flowers.
For a family preserving irreplaceable funeral flowers, Bouquet Casting Co is the best professional option covered in this guide because you are not locked into one preservation format. The same company offers resin, pressed designs, shadow boxes, small keepsakes, memorial jewelry, and combinations of flowers with personal mementos. Its current service also includes a shipping label, BloomSafe Insurance, and design mockups with revisions.
That flexibility matters because the flowers should determine the method.
Not the other way around.
What about DIY preservation?
DIY is reasonable when you have extra flowers and you accept some experimentation.
It is less appealing when you only have one rose from your parent’s casket spray.
Reddit discussions show exactly this concern. People asking how to preserve flowers from a grandmother’s or parent’s funeral repeatedly describe the same fear: there is only one set of flowers, and they do not want their first attempt at resin or drying to destroy them. Other resin users recommend practicing on ordinary flowers first or using a professional for irreplaceable memorial pieces.
That is good advice.
Buy a grocery store rose. Dry it. Press it. Cast it. Make your mistakes there.
Do not learn resin chemistry on the only rose you have from your father’s funeral.
And move quickly.
Fresh condition gives you options. Bouquet Casting Co’s current guidance recommends getting meaningful flowers into appropriate care and preservation as quickly as practical. Its existing funeral flower guide also covers pressing, drying, resin, and other routes when you are deciding what to do after a service.
Read how to preserve funeral flowers before attempting a home method on irreplaceable flowers.
If you are shipping your flowers, follow the preservation studio’s instructions rather than inventing your own packing system. Bouquet Casting Co’s Blossom Box, for example, uses a protective box insert, packing material, a separate stem bag, shipping label, order information, and step by step instructions.
The point is not perfection.
Real flowers change.
The goal is to preserve enough of the flower’s form, color, and story that the finished piece still takes you back to the person and the day.
Funeral Flower Preservation FAQ
Questions families ask most
What funeral flowers preserve the best?
Roses, carnations, baby’s breath, delphinium, chrysanthemums, and many types of greenery give you strong options because established preservation guidance supports desiccant drying, air drying, pressing, or combinations of those techniques depending on the flower. Baby’s breath is especially versatile. Purdue Extension lists it for air drying, natural drying, and pressing. Roses can be desiccated or pressed, while carnations and delphinium are established candidates for desiccant drying.
The best choice also depends on your finished keepsake. Large roses make more sense in many dimensional designs, while baby’s breath and small delphinium florets fit pressed artwork well.
Are roses good flowers to choose for funeral preservation?
Yes. Roses are one of the most flexible choices. Purdue Extension includes roses among flowers suitable for desiccant drying and pressing. Large, dense roses require more careful drying and can be difficult to press intact, so resin, shadow boxes, petal pressing, or smaller spray roses may produce a more natural result.
If the rose has emotional meaning, choose it. Preservation difficulty should not overrule significance.
Should I choose white funeral flowers if I want to preserve them later?
Yes, but expect color movement.
White flowers commonly dry toward ivory, cream, champagne, yellow, beige, or pale brown. This is a normal effect of preserving organic plant material. Bouquet Casting Co specifically identifies white flowers as more likely to show visible color shifting and offers color restoration for appropriate flowers when clients prefer a look closer to the fresh arrangement.
A useful strategy is to combine white focal flowers with greenery and a few stronger colored flowers when that fits the memorial.
Can I put fresh funeral flowers directly into resin?
Do not plan on it.
Flower preservation depends on removing moisture. Purdue Extension defines moisture removal as the basic goal of flower drying, while UF/IFAS describes silica gel and other desiccants as methods for drying flowers while supporting their shape.
Reddit resin communities repeatedly warn people preserving funeral flowers to dry the flowers first, and experienced crafters often recommend practicing before using irreplaceable memorial flowers.
For sentimental funeral flowers, professional preparation is the safer route.
Can flowers from a casket spray or funeral wreath be preserved?
Yes.
You do not need to preserve the entire spray or wreath exactly as it appeared at the funeral. Photograph the complete arrangement first, identify the most meaningful healthy flowers, save any ribbon or cards you care about, and then select flowers for the finished keepsake.
Bouquet Casting Co’s memorial service accepts funeral flowers together with prayer cards, photographs, fabric, lace, cremation remains, and other mementos, which makes a shadow box or coordinated memorial set especially useful for flowers removed from a large ceremonial arrangement.
Should I ask the funeral florist for extra flowers to preserve?
Yes, especially when preservation already matters to your family.
Spare stems give you backup material if flowers in the displayed arrangement become crushed, bruised, overheated, or otherwise damaged. Established horticultural guidance recommends beginning the drying process with plant material in excellent condition and even gathering extra material because some loss is normal during preservation.
Ask for several healthy loose stems from the same floral order and tell the florist why you want them.
For families who know they want a permanent keepsake, that tiny bit of planning can make the preservation process much easier.
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