Wooden Flowers?

These look great in a vase and require no water! Where did I find them? We went for a walk and noticed these dead bushes bearing wooden flowers! We finally figured out that they are dead protea bushes. We cut a few dead twigs off the dead bush and ended up with a bouquet of wooden flowers! [I think it is illegal to pick live proteas in the wild in South Africa, so we made sure these bushes were dead and that the flowers were empty (i.e. the seeds had already been carried away by the wind before we picked).]