Autumn Making, Organised by What You Can Collect

Almost everything worth making in autumn comes from five materials you can collect on one walk: branches, leaves, seed heads, windfall fruit and moss. None costs anything, and all five need drying before they come indoors properly.

A note before the walk. Take what has already fallen, take sparingly from living plants and never strip one bare, and check who owns the land. Seed heads left standing are food for birds through the winter, so leave most of them where they are.

Branches: the most useful thing you can carry home

Of the five, branches do the most work. They give height, which is the one thing a room cannot get from a bowl of small objects.

Choosing them. Look for a clear line and an asymmetric shape. Three branches of obviously different lengths — the longest roughly twice the shortest — make a better arrangement than seven similar ones. Beech holds its leaves longest after cutting; oak holds shape well; birch gives a pale line that reads against a dark wall.

Preparing them. Cut the base at a slant, strip any leaves that would sit below the waterline, and brush off loose lichen outdoors rather than in the kitchen.

What to do with them. Stand them in a weighted jug with sand or gravel in the base. Push them in at slight angles rather than straight up, and leave gaps — a dried arrangement works through silhouette, so the spaces matter as much as the stems. The same three-height logic that governs a styled mantel applies to a jug of branches.

A branch spray on the door is the other use: five or seven stems bound a third of the way up with a long ribbon over the binding. It stores flat and survives being knocked far better than a dense wreath.

Leaves: press them or wax them, and nothing in between

Fresh leaves brought indoors curl and go brittle within days. Two treatments make them last, and they give quite different results.

Pressing takes the longest and gives the flattest result. Lay leaves between sheets of plain paper — not newspaper, whose ink transfers — inside a heavy book, and leave them two to three weeks. Change the paper after the first few days if the leaves were at all damp. Pressed leaves are good for place settings, for writing names on in white pen, and for framing in a plain glass clip frame.

Waxing takes twenty minutes and keeps the leaf’s shape and gloss. Melt plain candle wax in a jug standing in a pan of simmering water, never over direct heat. Let it cool until a skin just starts to form, dip the leaf, lift it straight out and hang it to set. Waxed leaves keep their colour far longer and feel substantial enough to use on a table.

Choose leaves that are freshly fallen and still supple. Anything already dry and curled will not improve with either treatment.

Seed heads and grasses: the material that improves as it dries

This is the most forgiving material of the five, because drying is what it is supposed to do.

Teasel, poppy heads, honesty, dock, wild carrot and any ornamental grass all dry well. Cut or collect them on a dry day — anything gathered wet will go mouldy in a bunch.

Drying them. Hang in small loose bunches, heads down, somewhere dry with moving air and out of direct sun. A fortnight is usually enough. Crowded bunches dry unevenly and the centres spoil, so keep them smaller than feels efficient.

Using them. They want a tall narrow vessel that holds the stems upright, and they look best in a single species rather than mixed. Honesty, once the outer cases are rubbed off, gives translucent discs that catch low light remarkably well.

Windfall fruit: short-lived and worth it

Apples, crab apples, quinces and rosehips are the one material here with a deadline.

Quinces are the best of them. They sit in a bowl looking like heavy yellow fruit for several weeks and scent a whole room while they do it. They need nothing done to them at all.

Crab apples and rosehips can be threaded on wire into a short garland or scattered into a bowl among dried material. Expect ten days or so before they wrinkle, which is fine for a particular evening and no good for the whole season.

Apple and orange slices dry in a low oven at around 80 to 100°C over three to four hours with the door slightly ajar. Slice to about 4mm, blot both sides hard first, and turn them hourly. Slices cut thicker than that never dry properly and go mouldy within the week. The dried version keeps in a paper bag for years, and the method appears again in the Halloween projects guide.

Moss: a base rather than a subject

Moss is rarely the point of an arrangement, but it solves a problem nothing else does — it hides mechanics.

Collected sparingly from where it is already lifting, and never scraped off a wall or a living tree, it covers floral foam, the rim of a pot, the base of a bulb planting, or the inside edge of a shallow bowl.

Keep it barely damp and it stays green for weeks. Wet it properly and it rots; dry it out completely and it goes grey and crisp. A shallow bowl of moss with bulbs pushed into it is the simplest spring arrangement there is, which is where the spring guide picks up.

Drying, which is the step people skip

Nearly every failure with collected material is a drying failure, and the symptom is always the same: mould appearing a week after everything looked fine.

Air movement matters more than heat. A cool airy room beats a warm still one, and an airing cupboard is usually too warm and too enclosed. Spread material out rather than piling it, keep bunches small, and give it longer than you think — a fortnight for most things, three weeks for anything thick-stemmed.

Nothing goes into a sealed box or a plastic bag until it is completely dry and has been at room temperature for a few days. Paper bags and open boxes are right for storage; plastic traps the last of the moisture and finishes the lot.

Where the results go

A jug of branches, a bowl of quinces and a short run of dried slices cover height, scent and detail between them, which is most of what a room needs for the season.

For the table, the proportions depend on the shape of the table, which is set out in the autumn centrepiece guide. For a single vessel refilled through the year, the dough bowl guide covers the method, and for the porch, the three-stage approach uses most of this material outdoors where it can take the weather.