Flower Delivery Scone NSW: Horse Country, Flood Country

How I Would Talk You Through a Scone Sympathy Order

Anna, qualified florist | Trained in North Carolina, which is no preparation for an Upper Hunter January

The question came up hundreds of times in the three years I took calls out of a converted garage in Pottsville, and it was never the one people thought they were asking. They would ring wanting sympathy flowers for a town up the Hunter and open with the colour. Colour is the last decision. The first one is whether the flowers are going to the family’s house or to the service, because those are two different jobs running on two different clocks.

Flowers to the house have to last. Somebody tops the water up when they remember, nobody trims anything, and the bunch is still on the sideboard a fortnight later once the visitors have stopped coming. Flowers to a service have one afternoon to do their work and then they go to the grave or they go home in somebody’s boot. Build the two the same way and one of them fails.

Chrysanthemum, lisianthus and Asiatic lily hold up in a warm room. Oriental lily does not, and it fails in a way nobody expects. In the 28 to 32 degree range an Upper Hunter January sits in, mean maximum 30.9 degrees, the bud opens before the stem has built the strength to hold the bloom up, and you get a flower lying sideways in the vase in a house full of people who came to pay their respects.

So work out the address before you work out the colour. Get the service time from the funeral director before you order anything, because from what I saw on the phones a town this size does not run a funeral office with someone behind the counter all day, and turning up at four on a Thursday gets you nothing. Then order to the house, or to the service, or to both. Not to whichever one you thought of first.

Colour is easy once the address is settled, but ask one question before you pick it: what are they calling the thing. A funeral and a celebration of life are two different rooms. At a funeral, white and green is the safe answer for a reason. Turn up bright when everything else in there is white and people notice, and not the way you were hoping.

At a celebration of life, bright is the point, and the family will nearly always have a colour if you ask them for one. I built a whole arrangement around sunflowers once because that was what the woman grew in her backyard every summer, and nobody who was in that room forgot it. At the house, nobody is standing around judging the sideboard. Please yourself.

One more, and it lands harder in Scone than on most of the pages I worked. Before you decide what kind, decide whether flowers are wanted at all. Some families do not want them and would rather be asked than guessed at, so ask, and take the answer you get.

If the answer is yes and nobody can tell you what to send, Australian natives are the honest, unforced default. Banksia, waratah, kangaroo paw, wattle, eucalyptus. They connect to Country in a way an imported rose never will, and they carry none of the church reading that white lilies do. Waratah especially. It carries renewal, and it is the one you send when you are honouring an Elder.

Photographs on the card are welcome with some families and unwelcome with others. Same rule. Ask.

Last thing, and it is the one I would tell people if I only got one sentence. Write the card like it will outlast the flowers, because it will. Every bunch I ever sold is dead now. Not one person who rang me back afterwards could tell me what stems were in it. They could all tell me, word for word, what the card said.

How Flowers Get to a Scone Address the Same Day

There is no warehouse in the Upper Hunter with your order sitting in it. A florist within reach of Scone buys stems, builds the arrangement the morning it goes out, and drives it. That is the whole model, and it is the only reason same day works this far up the valley.

* The chalkboard version of what happens to an order after you press pay.

Most people see 270km to Sydney on a map and assume that is where Upper Hunter flowers come from. The Hunter has its own wholesale trade, out of Rutherford. Less than half the distance. Which means a florist working this valley has a shorter run behind their stems than the map to Sydney implies, and the gap between fresh and nearly fresh gets measured in hours, not days.

The part most flower websites skip

We found this business by accident. In 2007 we owned a gift shop in Kingscliff that did not deliver flowers, and the previous owner had left a Yellow Pages ad running that we knew nothing about. The phone rang twenty times a day for flowers to Taree, Coffs Harbour, Canberra, Townsville. Towns we had never been to.

We were annoyed by those calls for about six months. Then it landed on us that the annoying calls were the business, and everything we have built since was built for whoever is on the other end of them. Which today is you.

Sending flowers to a town you are not in has worked the same way for about a hundred years. You ring a florist near you, they ring a florist near the recipient, and the two of them carve it up between them. The trade calls it wire flowers. Interflora built an empire on it. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise, because it is physics: you cannot put a rose in a van in Sydney and have it look like anything by the time it reaches Segenhoe Road.

One more thing about the photos you just scrolled past. The florist builds from what is in the cool room that day. The picture is what the product looked like when somebody photographed it. Most days those are the same thing.

Some days they are not, and on those days you get the stem that came in strong rather than a rigid match to a photo using something already past its best. The gap between the photo and the vase is what a relay model costs you. What it buys you is a flower built that day within reach of the address instead of one boxed in a warehouse on Tuesday.

What we changed in 2009 was the deal, not the physics. We do not charge our partner florists a fee to be on this network. No joining cost, no monthly cost, no marketing spend, no website for them to build. We ask one thing, and we ask it up front: put a few more flowers in the bouquet to cover our commission. Then every order that comes off this page goes to the florist covering this area. Not to whoever came in cheapest that morning.

It is the same pitch we made to our first florist in a shed at Bray Park in 2009, and the number has been on the table ever since. We also went and hired two actual florists in 2010, Anna and Will. Partly for the phones. Mostly because we had worked out that florists do not take advice from two people who have never made a bouquet.

And since this is a page about a town we do not live in, the rest of it: our office is in Kingscliff, the phones have been answered out of Armidale since 2013, and neither of those is Scone. If what you want is a shopfront on Kelly Street, go and find one. Good thing. Different thing. What we are is the bit in the middle. We find the florist, we pay the florist, and we answer the phone when it goes wrong.

What Goes Wrong, and What We Changed

A late birthday is disappointing. A late funeral is unrecoverable. Troy rang about a delivery that missed its window, and it was the second kind, because a service at 10am is worth nothing at two and there is no version of sorry that fixes it. The run that day had his stop sitting behind two that were not time-critical, and the two in front ran longer than they were meant to. The routing was the failure there, and it was ours, not the florist’s. We refunded it and we sent again.

Then we changed the run order. Time-sensitive occasions go first now, regardless of what else is on the sheet and regardless of what the map says is the efficient loop. It costs the florist petrol and it costs us efficiency on paper, and on a good week nobody would ever know we do it. In a town like Scone, where the road can be the variable in June, going first is the only version of the promise that survives a bad morning.

After You Order

Once you press pay, the order leaves as a paid job to a florist within range of Scone. They build it the same day from what they have in the cool room. Nobody at our end touches a stem and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the pretending is what gets everybody into trouble later.

If something looks wrong when the photo comes through, ring 1300 360 469, 7am to 6pm on weekdays and from 10am on Saturdays, or email [email protected]. Same day. Three days later there is nothing left to fix and all I can do is refund you, which is the worst available outcome for both of us.

There is no call centre here and there is no boardroom. Two of us, two kids, and a dog called Bindi, and most of what happens to this business still gets worked out at the dinner table or somewhere between the car and a netball court. When an order goes wrong badly enough to complain about, you get one of us on the phone rather than somebody reading a script. None of that is a service promise. It is just the size of the company.

Siobhan, the other half of this

The bit nobody warns you about is the waiting. You have paid, you have rewritten the card message four times (I still do this, every single time, and I have been at it since 2009), and then there is just silence, and by four in the afternoon you have decided they hated them or the address was wrong or nobody was home. Give it a day. Half the people who ring worried have simply been beaten by a recipient who was at work, or asleep, or crying and not thinking about their phone at all. The flowers have already done their work in that room whether anybody has managed to tell you about it yet or not. The photo comes when it comes.

Phone beats email if it is happening today. Email beats phone if you want it in writing.

ABN: 17 830 858 659