I hate silk flowers. Or polyester. Or plastic. Or any kind of flower that didn’t once have chlorophyll coursing through its leaves.
But I like dried flowers – especially the blossoms that were once part of fresh arrangements on my table, and then settled in for a long period of mummification, kind of like the pharaohs. Yet they still look handsome in their own romantic way and, unlike artificial flowers, I’m very happy to have them on the dining room buffet.
Take this arrangement I put together for a dinner party on October 6th of last year. Before it had withered too much, I took the entire thing, tied a string around it and hung it upside down in the dark furnace room. 
Checking on it a few weeks later, the celosia was well-dried but fragile and easily shattered; the hypericum berries had turned black; and the blue sea holly (Eryngium) was dry but looked very much as it had when fresh. I carefully added some roses I’d dried the same way and popped the whole thing into a different vase. 
The dried flowers gave me joy over the long winter months and still look beautiful, in their own way, today. And best of all, they weren’t polyester.