Flower Delivery Arncliffe: Same Day

Most people assume flowers die because they are old. Anna disagrees. She spent fifteen years as a working florist before joining Lily's, and the pattern she noticed over thousands of arrangements was consistent. Cloudy vase water within two days. Petals dropping by day four. The arrangement looking tired well before it should.

"Nine times out of ten, the problem is leaves sitting under the waterline," she says. "People arrange the stems and forget to strip the lower foliage. Those submerged leaves start to rot within hours. The bacteria multiply in the water, and eventually they physically block the stem from drinking. I used to get calls about arrangements dying at the four day mark and the first question was always the same. Did you strip the leaves? Almost nobody had."

For a suburb like Arncliffe that bakes in westerly heat during summer, Anna adds a second layer. Warm water breeds bacteria faster than cool water. "A vase sitting on a kitchen bench in a west facing apartment on Princes Highway will reach room temperature quickly. The bacteria double their numbers roughly every twenty minutes once the water warms up. Change the water every second day, use the flower food sachet that comes in the cellophane because it is antibacterial, and if you can, keep the vase off the windowsill." She is specific about the sachet because most people throw it away. The preservative in that little packet controls the pH and feeds sugar to the stems at the same time. Without it, the water is just water.

One more thing she flags. Fruit bowls. Bananas, apples, and stone fruit release ethylene gas as they ripen. That gas triggers the same ageing hormone in cut flowers that tells them to drop petals and shut down. In an open kitchen this is less of an issue, but in those newer Wolli Creek apartments where the kitchen bench is two metres from the dining table, a fruit bowl next to the vase can shorten the arrangement by three or four days. A metre of distance between the two changes the outcome completely.