Flowers to Colac, Colder Than the Coast

Why Colac Flowers Last Longer Than the Weather Suggests

Anna, qualified florist | North Carolina trained, fifteen years on the bench in cold country

People hear Great Ocean Road and picture mild, soft coastal air. Colac is inland and high, and it earns a hard frost. I learned the trade back in North Carolina, where winter is a proper season and cold-dry air will pull the life out of an exposed stem in a morning, so a Colac frost reads as familiar to me rather than strange. The Shire Office gauge reads a July morning low of 3.9 degrees, and on a still night the fog rolls off Lake Colac, the largest natural freshwater lake in Victoria, and the chill pools in the low streets. A bloke rang once from up in Queensland, sending to his mum in Colac, and would not believe me she would have to bring them in off the porch in July. It is a different country down here. Colac runs several degrees under Geelong on a winter morning, closer to Hobart than to the coast an hour east, and that one fact decides what I would send there and how I would want it delivered.

The part that catches people out is a good one. Cold is hard on a bouquet left out on a frosted doorstep, where wind and frost draw the moisture straight out of exposed petals and soft heads nip and brown by mid-morning. Get it indoors, though, and that same cold is the best thing going for it. Warmth speeds a flower's clock. Cool slows it right down. A rose that gives a Melbourne friend about a week will often give a Colac one closer to ten days, sometimes fourteen, in a cool lounge room. Chrysanthemums can run three weeks. A cool country room simply keeps a cut stem longer, and it is the one advantage nobody expects. An extra week in the vase matters most when there is nobody nearby to freshen it, which on an order sent from the city is usually the case.

So for Colac I lean on stems built for it: chrysanthemums, carnations, alstroemeria that actually prefers a cool room, natives like banksia and leucadendron, and the winter tulips and ranunculus that are at their cheapest and best through the colder months. The stock comes up the highway from the Melbourne Market at Epping and the flower farms of the Dandenong Ranges, a short hardy inland run by national standards, no ferry and no plane. Stems arrive a touch older than a city shopfront's, then Colac's cool buys most of that back. The difference is quiet but it is real: a bunch boxed in a city warehouse on a Tuesday and opened in Colac on a Thursday has spent two days in cardboard, while the one a partner florist builds the morning it goes out still has its full life in it. Send hydrangea and soft spring stems if you like, but keep them off a winter porch. Frost and thirst finish those first.

How a Colac Order Actually Gets There

People picture a warehouse when they order to a country town from the city. In a place like Colac, a florist is still someone you walk into a shop and know by name, and that face-to-face trust is exactly what a sender three hours away is trying to buy from a screen. Colac does not work the warehouse way.

The other worry, and it is one a country town earns honestly, is whether an order to a place like this arrives at all. Regional addresses are exactly where flowers quietly go missing in this trade. The network is built so that a fogged-in lake road or a closed stretch of highway sends an order to another partner rather than stranding it, which for a town an hour from anywhere is the whole game.

There is no shed somewhere with 'Colac' on a label. Your order goes to a florist in or near town, made the morning it is delivered and driven round the same day. This is the whole reason we built it this way.

* You won't be there to watch any of it, so here is exactly what happens once your order lands in the network.

After You Order

Once you have ordered, it is out of your hands and into ours, which is the bit that makes people twitchy, so here is where it goes. Your order lands with us, we send it to a partner florist in or close to Colac as a paid order, and they build and deliver it that day. You do not see any of that happen, and the not-seeing is the hard part.

If anything looks off when it arrives, ring us on 1300 360 469 or email [email protected] the same day, while we can still do something about it. When you ring, a real person answers, 7am to 6pm on weekdays and 10am Saturdays, and can actually chase it down. The same-day call is worth ten reviews written a week later.

From Andrew, the other half of it

We have been getting flowers into Colac since 2009. One of our early florists, Will, set it up. He had been one of the best in Sydney before he came to us, and he found a florist on Murray Street willing to take our orders, a shop that worked with us exclusively until 2013 before the network here widened out. The one thing the years taught us about a town like Colac is funerals. An order at three on a Friday for a Saturday service asks the system to do what it cannot always do, so now we push people to lock service flowers in the day before, and if a timing looks tight we ring back rather than let it fail quietly. Better a phone call than a bad morning.

And if you do not hear back from them for a day or two, that is normal. People are often quietly wrecked by a good surprise. The order went where it was meant to go.

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