What One Gerbera Tells You About Your Flower Delivery

Either the flowers have already gone and you are looking at a photo on your phone working out whether you got what you paid for, or somebody is in a bed you cannot get to and you are about to send something you will never see. Here is how to read the thing you cannot hold.

A photo came in with a review one afternoon in June, flowers on a desk at a hospital up at Birtinya on the Sunshine Coast, next to a ward phone and one of those panels covered in equipment stickers, and somebody had put them in water and got back to their shift. I looked at the lilies. I always look at the lilies. Anna looked at the gerbera and had it graded before I finished reading the review.

The review

Beautiful bouquet that looked exactly like the photo on the website. The flowers were fresh and vibrant. They were the perfect gift to send to patient in hospital. Highly recommended!

Heeni R. · Queensland · verified purchase Read the original

Of everything in that review, looking exactly like the photo is the hard one. Nobody outside the trade thinks so.

Around 2013 we worked out that neither of us could talk flowers properly with the florists we were signing up, so we went and hired actual trade. Anna learnt in North Carolina and was working at a small boutique florist at Salt when I met her. Twenty years in and I still go straight to the expensive stem, which she finds funny, and which is more or less why she is here.

Anna graded the workmanship first and then she started on the recipe, which is what happens when you ask a tradesperson to look at something.

Heeni's flowers were a hit and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Both things are true at once. The florist who made that bunch did the hard part properly and the stem list was built for a lounge room. If you tell us at checkout that it is going to a ward, we get that changed before it is made.

Birtinya means Sunshine Coast University Hospital, on Doherty Street, and most of what we route there has a ward at the end of it. Our florist delivers to main reception. They do not walk through the building, because external couriers are generally not allowed on clinical wards. Reception checks the patient is admitted, a ward clerk collects them, and a nurse or a volunteer walks them the last leg, which in our experience runs anywhere from half an hour to three hours. So when I say same day, I mean at the hospital the same day. What time it reaches the bed is not mine to promise.

Two things help. Wait until the patient has a ward before you order, because an arrangement that turns up while somebody is still in emergency sits at the front desk with nobody's name on it. And put the full name and ward number in the notes, because in our experience a hospital will not tell a florist where a patient is.

Murwillumbah was the first town we ever signed a partner florist in, and before that existed it was the hospital Siobhan was driving the flowers to herself. She did seven years on the phones with me after, 2006 through to 2013, and the hospital calls are the ones she remembers.

My first ever flower call, back in the Kingscliff shop, a woman asked me three quick questions and I stood there looking at Siobhan across the store room like a man who had wandered into the wrong job. Hang on, I said, I will check with my wife. The blind leading the blind. I have got better since, though not so much better that I should be explaining stem physiology to anybody, which is what I did in that review reply.

I wrote hollow stem. That is the shorthand Anna gave me and it is what every florist I have ever met says (all of us wrong, as it turns out). The hole is not what does it. Somebody tested that properly in 2012 and the bending had nothing to do with the size of the cavity, and nothing to do with stem length either. It came down to how hard the stem was fighting for water and how little sclerenchyma it had laid down, which is the reinforcing tissue Anna calls lignin when she is talking to me. A 2019 study reached the same place from the genetics end and called it water stress.

Conditioning is the part that matters, and it is the step that goes first when a bench is under pressure, because it is the only step nobody downstream can see. Those four stems arrived on that bench with four different amounts of life left in them. Gerberas grown up the road, lisianthus off a refrigerated truck from Victoria, roses off a plane. A bucket of water on the right morning is what evens them up.