Cogra Bay Flowers, Delivered Across the Water

The Thing About a Waterway Address That Catches Most Senders Out

Anna, qualified florist | fifteen years on the bench, and with a river address the callers always opened with the same question, whether the flowers would even make it across

The callers sending flowers to a place like Cogra Bay almost always worried about the wrong thing. They worried about the boat. The boat is twenty minutes. What actually shortens a bunch out here is the air. A waterway address holds humidity that runs near 84 percent on a still summer morning, higher than the inland weather station ever reads, because the river and the bay and the bush are all breathing moisture back at the flowers all day. I learnt my trade in the humid end of North Carolina, so this is the air I came up in, and the truth is most stems drink that moisture and last longer for it.

The exceptions are the dense, soft-petalled ones. Warm, still, wet air is how botrytis gets going on them. Botrytis is grey mould. It starts as brown freckling on the softest petals, garden roses and dahlias and peonies first, and once it takes hold the bloom folds in on itself inside a day. Worth knowing if it happens to you: that brown freckling on the outer petals is the mould, not bruising and not a dud stem. Peel the marked petals back and the bloom underneath is usually perfect. A garden rose that gives you eight good days in a dry Parramatta kitchen gives five out here in February, sometimes fewer. Callers would ring back to tell me the same bunch had behaved like two different products, and the only thing that changed was the room it sat in.

So out here you build against the moisture. Chrysanthemums, carnations, lisianthus and the firm native stems do not mind a humid morning the way a peony does. A disbud chrysanthemum holds close to two weeks at this temperature, and a carnation, waxy and tough, is about the most weatherproof thing in the cool room. The banksias, flannel flowers and grevilleas that grow right across Brisbane Water National Park, on the same sandstone the houses are pegged to, were made for exactly this air, and a leucadendron will sit there looking good for a fortnight without trying. A box holds its own water and shrugs off the trip better than an open vase. Send soft, dense petals into a Hawkesbury summer and you are paying for something that looks tired by the third day. Send the tough stems and you are paying for two good weeks.

And the stems do not travel as far as you would think. The partner florist buys at the Sydney flower market at Flemington, but a fair slice of what goes in your bunch grew on the Central Coast itself, roses and gerberas out of Narara, ten minutes up the road from the bench that builds it. For somewhere this tucked away, the flowers have a shorter run to you than the trip to the door makes it look.

How a Cogra Bay Order Reaches the Water

There is no warehouse on the river sending these out. A partner florist makes your arrangement the morning it goes, it stages at Brooklyn, and the last leg is a boat. Sydney market, cool room, road, then twenty minutes of open water. Four hand-offs, and only the last one has no refrigeration.

* What happens to your order the moment it enters the Lily's Florist network.

The whole chain is built to land before the afternoon heat does. Order early and the day has room for the florist to build it well and for the crossing to be a calm one. I have sat on the phone enough times working out a Cogra Bay drop to know the morning orders are the easy ones. Leave it late and the maths stops working, because the water leg cannot be rushed and a rough afternoon on the river waits for nobody.

After You Order

Once you have ordered, the job lands with us and goes straight to a partner florist in or near the Gosford area as a paid order. They build it that morning and run it down to Brooklyn for the crossing. Years ago I ran flower deliveries myself, a newborn screaming in the back of the car, five minutes to get a bunch to a hospital reception in 37-degree heat with no park in sight. I know the feeling of a handover you cannot control. The water crossing is that kind of handover, so we took it off you. You do not organise the boat or chase a water taxi. That part is on us.

If anything looks off when it lands, or it has not turned up when you expected, ring 1300 360 469, 7am to 6pm on weekdays and up to the 10am cutoff on Saturdays, or email [email protected]. The sooner we hear, the more we can do, and a photo of what arrived helps us sort it the same day.

A word from Siobhan, the other half of Lily's

Here is the bit nobody warns you about. You send flowers to a place you cannot picture, to someone you cannot watch open them, and then you wait. With a river address the wait can stretch a while, because the reception out there is patchy and people are off doing the very thing they went there to do. If you have not had a photo back by evening, it does not mean it went wrong. It means they are living their weekend (which is rather the whole point). The flowers have already done their job in that house, whether they have managed to text you yet or not.

You will not get to watch it go across the water. There is no honest way around that. What you get instead is a person on the end of the phone who can tell you it did.

ABN: 17 830 858 659