How to Preserve Fall Leaves

Snip a little off the bottom of each stem before anything else. It is the same reason you cut flowers before they go in a vase - a fresh cut opens the stem back up so the leaf can draw liquid instead of sitting sealed.

Pick leaves that have only just come down. A leaf that has been lying on wet ground for a week has already started to break down and will not take up much of anything.

Glycerine sits in the baking aisle next to the food colouring, and a bottle costs very little. Empty the whole thing into a shallow dish.

Hang on to the empty pot. That is your measuring cup for the next step, which saves working out millilitres.

Fill the empty glycerine pot with water and tip it in. Do it twice for every pot of glycerine you used - two parts water, one part glycerine.

That ratio is the entire recipe. Too much glycerine and the leaves go greasy; too much water and they just rot.

Give it a good stir. Glycerine is thick and heavy and it will happily sit in a layer on the bottom of the dish if you let it.

Leaves resting on a pool of neat glycerine while the top of the dish is nearly all water will not preserve evenly, and you cannot tell by looking once the leaves are in.

Put the leaves into the dish and press them under the surface. Make sure the cut ends of the stems are properly submerged, because the stem is what does the drinking.

Set a plate on top so everything stays under. Leaves float, and any part of a leaf that sits above the surface simply will not take up the solution - you get a dry, brittle patch on an otherwise good leaf.

Put the dish somewhere out of the way and forget about it for a few days. Check on it as you go.

You will see the leaves darken a little and the solution turn cloudy. That is normal. They are ready when a leaf feels supple rather than papery between your fingers.

Take the leaves out and pat them on kitchen paper. They come out soft and slightly leathery with a faint sheen, which is exactly what you want - a preserved leaf you can bend without it snapping.

Yellows and greens will have held their colour well. Reds will have shifted towards brown, and there is not much you can do about that with this method.