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Forty minutes after a lily delivery lands, sometimes less, an email comes in. The wording barely changes. The flowers are lovely but they are all closed, is that right? I answered that question on the phone from the Marine Parade shop in Kingscliff and then from the Pottsville home office, 2006 through to 2013, more times than I could count, and every single time I had to talk myself out of feeling bad about it.
Because the answer is yes. That is right. A lily that arrives as a tight green bud with a blush of colour on the lowest one was cut a day or two ago, has not been knocked about open in a box, and has ten days or so of opening ahead of it on someone's kitchen bench. A lily that arrives fully open has spent those days somewhere else, in a bucket, under shop lights, being lovely for nobody in particular.
A tight bunch is the best thing we can send and the thing most likely to get a worried email in the first hour. Both are true and I have stopped trying to make them not be. So here is the whole thing in one place: which lily is which, why it comes closed, what the week on the bench looks like, the pollen, the cat, and how to pick one for the door it is going to. Anna has the bench side because it is hers and not mine. Andrew has the part about where the stems come from, because he cannot help himself.
01
Why the buds arrive green
The trade cuts lilies on purpose at the point most buyers think is too early.
The growers have a name for the moment they cut, colour break, and for the first couple of years I did not know it, I just knew that the tight bunches were the ones nobody rang about on day five. It turns out there is a trial behind that, and Anna has the why, which is below. What I can tell you from the sending side is the simple version. Every day of ripeness a stem has when it is cut is a day it does not have when it reaches the vase.
The evidence
Stems harvested at green bud stage recorded a vase life of 14.33 days and took up more vase solution than stems cut riper, in a trial on Oriental lily cv. Avocado published in the Journal of Applied and Natural Science.3 The practical reading is simple: the bunch that looks least ready is the bunch with the most left in it.
The trouble is the photograph. Every lily you have ever seen in an ad or a catalogue was shot at full peak, because that is when a lily photographs. So the picture in your head is day six, and the thing that turns up is day one. Nothing has gone wrong. You are just meeting it earlier in its life than the photo did.
I know the picture-in-your-head problem from the other side of the counter. Andrew and I bought a daggy old florist and gift shop on Marine Parade in Kingscliff in November 2006, the accountant told us not to, and I was seven months off having Asha. Neither of us had sold a flower in our lives. The phone would ring, someone would fire three questions at Andrew about lilies, and he would look at me in total confusion and say hang on, I will just check with my wife. The blind leading the blind. We did the deliveries ourselves in those years, thousands of them, and the lily lesson arrived on a doorstep in Kingscliff in our first summer. Andrew handed over a bunch of tight white Orientals, the woman looked at them, looked at him, and asked if these were the cheap ones. He said no, they open, and then, because he was not at all sure, drove back to the shop to ask me. Neither of us knew. We rang the wholesaler. That bunch was still going when he delivered to the same street nine days later, and she waved him down to say so. That is where the first half of this page comes from. Anna, who actually knew what she was doing, is where the second half comes from.
Anna
Qualified florist15+ years on the bench
Green buds are not unripe. They are the days you paid for. Colour break is the point where the bottom bud on the stem stops being plain green and the first streak of pink or white shows through the skin, with every bud above it still sealed. That is when the grower cuts.2 Cut there, the petals are still folded where a box lid cannot bruise them, the anthers are shut inside so there is no loose pollen in the sleeve, and the bud has enough sugar stored to finish opening on its own once it gets water again. Cut a day riper and you have traded a day of vase life for a nicer looking bucket.
The first time I bought a bunch of half-open Orientals for the shop because they looked better in the bucket, I watched them fold in four days while the tight ones beside them were still going the next week. Never did it again.
What I looked for at the market was the bottom bud. Plump, firm, with colour showing through the skin like a bruise coming up, and at least one more bud above it fully sized but shut. Leaves glossy and green right down to the base. A stem end that is cut clean, not slimy. If pollen is already loose in the sleeve, the stem has been open a while and somebody has been handling it. Put it back.
02
Oriental, Asiatic or LA: which lily you are buying
Three types cover almost every lily sold in an Australian shop, and the differences decide the room they belong in.
The Royal Horticultural Society sorted the cultivated lilies into nine divisions back in the 1960s, based on parentage rather than looks, and the scheme still stands.1 For a buyer, three of the nine do the work. Orientals are the big, heavily scented ones, the Stargazer pinks and the Casa Blanca whites, with two to six blooms a stem that open outward or hang. Asiatics are smaller, upward facing, unscented, and come in the colours Orientals cannot, the oranges and clear yellows and reds. LA hybrids are a cross between the Christmas lily and an Asiatic, so you get an Asiatic's colour range on a bigger, sturdier flower with only the faintest scent.2
| Type | What you get | Best door |
|---|---|---|
| Oriental | Blooms up to 20cm across, strong perfume, white to deep pink. The lily that fills a room. Vase life 6 to 14 days. | Home, sympathy |
| Asiatic | Smaller cup-shaped blooms, no scent, the brightest colour range. Three to twelve buds a stem. Vase life 4 to 14 days. | Desks, shared rooms |
| LA hybrid | Big up-facing flowers on a sturdy stem, mild scent at most, pink, yellow, white and red. Vase life 7 to 14 days. | Anywhere, apartments |
| Christmas lily | Lilium longiflorum, the pure white trumpet, sweet scent, in season around December here. The same plant is the Easter lily up north. | Seasonal |
When someone searches for pink lilies they almost always mean an Oriental, usually Stargazer or Sorbonne. White lilies means Casa Blanca or Siberia, or the Christmas lily in December. Yellow lilies, and anything orange, are Asiatics or LAs, which is why the yellow bunch never fills a room the way the white one does. Neither is better. One of them is right for the room.
Shop by colour
Pink for a celebration, white for sympathy, yellow for a room where scent is a problem.
Green buds are not unripe. They are the days you paid for.Anna · Qualified florist
03
The first ten days on the bench
What a three or four bud Oriental actually does after it is unwrapped, day by day, and what to do at each step.
This is the bit I wish I had been able to post to people in 2008 instead of describing it down the phone, badly, from the Pottsville office. It is Anna's ledger, not mine, and it is written the way she says things, so expect to be told what to do.
Day 0
Arrival
Tight buds, the lowest one coloured. Cut two or three centimetres off each stem on an angle, because a flat cut seals against the bottom of the vase and an angled one keeps the channel open. Strip every leaf that would sit under the water. Every single one. Deep clean vase, the flower food sachet at the rate on the packet, room temperature water because it moves up the stem more easily than cold. Somewhere cool, out of the sun, away from the fruit bowl. Lilies open from the bottom of the stem up, one at a time, and a bud showing colour is usually open within a day at room temperature.2 Warm room, faster. Cool room, slower. That is the whole control panel and the recipient is holding it.
Day 1 to 2
The first bloom
The bottom bud opens. Pinch the anthers off with a tissue the moment they show, before the pollen dries and goes powdery. On an Oriental the scent starts here and builds.
Day 3 to 4
Second bloom
The next bud up opens while the first is at its peak. Anthers off again. This is the day the bunch looks like the photograph.
Day 5 to 6
Change the water
Third bloom opens. Tip the water out, rinse the vase, recut a centimetre off the stems, refill with food. The first bloom may start to soften at the edges. Pull it off when it does; it costs nothing and the stem looks new.
Day 7 to 9
The top bud
The last buds open, with one exception. The smallest bud at the very top of the stem quite often does not open within the first week, and on some stems never does. A 2024 study of commercially processed Orientals found exactly that, and it is a property of the cut stem, not a fault in the bunch.4
Day 10 to 14
The tail
The last blooms fade. In a cool room with clean water a good stem gets to a fortnight. In a hot room with the vase on a windowsill it is closer to a week, and that is not the flower's doing.
Worth knowing
The sachet matters more for lilies than for most stems, and the formulation matters too. Sugar in the vase water is what gets the upper buds to open, but the same sugar speeds up leaf yellowing from the base of the stem, which is why lily-specific flower foods exist and why good growers treat the leaves at the farm before the stems ship.6 Use the sachet the florist sends. Do not double it.
Anna
Qualified floristOn what goes wrong
Bud blast is the trade word for a bud that gives up and never opens. It comes from not enough light, not enough water, or too long in the cold before it got to you. A lily that spent four or five days in a cool room before it was sold gets touchy about ethylene, which is the gas ripening fruit gives off. A stem cut and sold inside a couple of days barely notices a banana on the bench. One that sat a week in a cool room will drop its top buds from a fruit bowl across the room.5 That is the real reason to keep them apart, and it is why I never left lily buckets in the cool room over a long weekend.
Order before 2pm today
See all lilies It goes out on this afternoon's run and the first bloom opens at their place tomorrow.
04
Pollen, scent and the cat
The three things a lily can do to a house, and the one of them that is a genuine emergency.
The pollen. Of all the lily calls I took between 2006 and 2013 the pollen ones were the most common and, I am sorry to say, the funniest, because it was always a white shirt or a cream lounge, and the person had always done the one thing you must not do, which is rub it, and usually the second thing, which is wet it. The rust colour goes into the fabric and stays. Andrew learned this at John Flynn Hospital in 2007, carrying an open bunch of Stargazers up to a ward against his chest, and arrived at the nurses' station with an orange stripe from collar to belt that the nurse pointed at before she said hello. That polo never came back. From then on he took the anthers off in the car park with a tissue, every lily, every time, and I am telling you so you do not have to learn it on a white shirt.
So, before it happens. Pinch the anthers off as each bloom opens, while they are still firm, with a tissue or a gloved finger (on a Stargazer they stick right out, it takes a second). If it is already on something, hands off it, take it outside and shake it, then dab at it with sticky tape, sticky side out, fresh bit each time, and let the sun have a go at what is left before you go anywhere near a stain remover. Anna also holds that a lily with its anthers off lasts longer, because it has not been pollinated. The trade agrees with her and the trials are split, so I file the clean lounge as the proven part and the extra days as a bonus.
Scent is the second thing, and it is only a problem in the wrong room. A bunch of white Orientals in a hallway is one of the great pleasures of a house. The same bunch beside a bed in a four-bed ward, or on a dining table, or in a studio apartment with the windows shut in July, is a lot. Andrew found the limit one February afternoon with three sympathy sheaths of white Orientals in the back of the car for a funeral home in Tweed Heads, windows up, air conditioning on, and by Chinderah he had every window down and his head half out of it like the dog. He delivered them looking like he had been crying, which at a funeral home nobody questioned. For those rooms send an Asiatic or an LA, which look like lilies and smell of nothing, and keep the Orientals for the house with a hallway.
One caveat
True lilies are severely toxic to cats. Every part of the plant, the petals, the leaves, the pollen and the water in the vase, and a cat that licks pollen off its coat or drinks from the vase can go into kidney failure. There is no safe amount and no antidote, and the early signs, vomiting and going quiet and off food, can show within a couple of hours.7 Treated early the outlook is good. Left a day or two it is often not. Pollen-free lilies are still toxic to cats, because it was never only the pollen.8 If the house has a cat, do not send lilies in any form. Nothing on this page changes that.
The number to have in your phone is the Animal Poisons Helpline, 1300 869 738, a free service for Australian pet owners staffed by people with emergency veterinary and clinical pharmacy backgrounds.9 Dogs get off far more lightly; a dog that eats a lily usually ends up with an upset stomach and nothing worse.7 If you are sending to a house and you are not sure about the cat, ring the house. If you cannot, pick roses or gerberas or natives from our mixed range and you have lost nothing.
05
Where an Australian lily comes from
Andrew on the part of the supply chain that surprises even florists.
Andrew Thomson
Co-founderRuns the network
Australia imported $96.7 million of cut flowers in 2023-24. Malaysia, Kenya, Ecuador, China, Colombia.11 None of it was lilies. Lilium cut stems are not permitted into the country. What comes in is the bulb, mostly from the Netherlands, which grows about three quarters of the world's lily bulbs, and the bulb has to go into open quarantine at an approved premises here before anything grown from it can be sold as a cut flower.10 So a rose in an Australian bucket might have flown from Nairobi. The lily beside it was grown in a greenhouse in this country, full stop.
Most of them come out of Victoria. There is a family operation at Silvan in the Dandenong foothills, started in 1997 by a descendant of Dutch bulb growers, that grows lilies under glass all year and gets new varieties through its links back to Holland.12 Tasmania grows bulbs at Wynyard, mostly for gardeners. The Adelaide Hills chill dormant bulbs to trick them into flowering out of season. Between the three, a lily is available every week of the year, and the Christmas lily is a Christmas lily here because Lilium longiflorum flowers in December in this hemisphere.13 Up north it is the Easter lily. Same plant.
Two things that follow from all this. First, our product photos show the Premium size with a mix of open blooms and buds, because that is what a lily looks like when it photographs, and the bunch at the door will be tighter than that. We say so on the product page. Second, on Mother's Day and Valentine's week the whole country wants the same stems on the same three days. Stem length and bud count can come in a notch under the photo in those weeks. If it comes in more than a notch under, send us a photo the same day and we sort it.
06
Which lilies for which door
The same stem is the right gift at one address and the wrong one at the next. Sort by the door first, then pick.
A house with a hallway and a vase in the cupboard takes anything. An apartment or a share house takes an arrangement that arrives in its own container, because there is a fair chance nobody owns a vase tall enough for a metre of lily. A funeral service takes a sheath or a wreath, because a bunch has nowhere to sit. A family home in the week after a death takes stems that keep going with no attention, because nobody in that house is changing vase water. A hospital ward, in our experience, does not take a lily at all. Most general wards accept flowers, but the scent in a shared room and the pollen on the linen make lilies the flower the nurses like least, and the oncology, haematology and intensive care wards we deliver near tend not to accept flowers of any kind. Andrew wrote the hospital piece for exactly that reason.
A word on white. In Chinese tradition the word for lily, bai he, sounds like the phrase for a hundred years of harmonious union, which makes the lily a wedding and anniversary flower, and white is also the colour of mourning, so a white lily at a Chinese-Australian celebration is often paired with red or gold to tip it the right way. If you are sending across a tradition you do not know, the pink Oriental is the safer congratulations and the white one the safer condolence, and the sympathy lilies page is sorted for that job.
07
Questions people ask us
Why are my lilies green? Did I get an old bunch?
The opposite. Green buds with colour on the lowest one mean the stems were cut at the right moment and have the whole run of opening ahead of them. An old bunch is the one that arrives already open. Give them water and a cool spot and the first bloom is open within a day or two.
How do I make lilies open faster for a dinner on Saturday?
Warm water in the vase, a warm room, and good light, and a coloured bud will be open inside a day. To hold them back for a party later in the week, do the reverse: cool room, cool water, out of the sun. Do not put them in the fridge with fruit; the fruit is what does the damage.
Why has the top bud on my lily never opened?
The smallest bud at the top of a cut stem often will not. It was the youngest when the stem was cut and there was not enough stored sugar left for it once the lower blooms had opened. Light, water and the flower food sachet all help, but it is a normal outcome, not a sign of a bad stem.
Are pink lilies and Stargazers the same thing?
Stargazer is the most famous pink Oriental, bred in the 1970s, up-facing and heavily scented, but not every pink lily is one. Sorbonne is a paler pink Oriental with a white edge, and Brindisi is a soft pink LA hybrid with almost no scent. If scent matters either way, that is the question to ask.
Do lilies actually last longer than roses?
Usually, because of the staggered opening. A rose is one flower with one lifespan. A lily stem with five buds is five flowers opening in sequence over ten to fourteen days, so the stem is still showing something new when a rose bought the same day is finishing. Chrysanthemums and carnations outlast both, which is why they sit beside the lilies in most of our sympathy bunches.
Can I put lilies in the fridge overnight?
One night is fine if there is no fruit in there. Beyond about four days of cold the leaves start yellowing from the base and the stems become far more sensitive to ethylene, so a fridge is a short pause, not a way to store them.
Siobhan Thomson
Co-founderA note to close
The email I mentioned at the top, the one that comes in forty minutes after the delivery. I used to reply to those with the whole explanation, colour break and sugar and the bottom bud, and I noticed after a year or so that the reply hardly ever landed. What landed was the second email, four days later, with a photo of the same bunch half open on the bench and a line like oh, I see now.
So if you are the one sending, and you are nervous that it will look like nothing when it arrives, it will look like a little less than nothing for a day. Then it gets better every morning for a week while the person you sent it to watches. That is the gift, really. Not the flowers. The week.
Send the ten days, not the photograph
Every lily we deliver is built that morning by a partner florist near the address, from stems grown in this country and cut at colour break. Order before 2pm on a weekday and it is at their door this afternoon, with the whole week still in it.
Same day when you order before 2pm weekdays or 10am Saturdays. No Sunday delivery except Mother's Day. Questions on 1300 360 469, 7am to 6pm weekdays, from 10am Saturday.
