Sending Flowers to the Quiet Side of the Coast

Why a Native Arrangement Lasts Twice in a Bush Suburb

Anna, qualified florist | Took the calls from the Pottsville home office for three years.

Native arrangements last twice. People think the gift is over when the flowers drop, but banksia cones and waratah heads have a woody core that dries and holds its shape for months. Callers sending to bush addresses would ask if natives were the right call, and the answer was almost always yes. You give two gifts in one order. Colour and scent for the first week or so. Then the cones and pods dry where the receiver put them, and most never go in the bin.

The opening phase runs seven to ten days depending on care. After that, instead of the whole arrangement going out, the receiver pulls the natives and keeps them in a dry vase or on a shelf. I had customers ring back six months later still pleased the banksia cone was sitting on the kitchen ledge. That suits a place like Fountaindale, where people have the wall space and the kind of home where dried bush elements look right against the timber.

There is a piece of the supply chain that helps here too. A good chunk of the native and mixed lines coming through the network this week were on a truck out of the Sydney Flower Market at Homebush, and Homebush picks up a fair amount of its natives from growers in Narara and Terrigal, two suburbs south of Fountaindale. The flowers go to Sydney to come back to the coast. It means the stems in your arrangement have been on the truck once, not five days into the cool room. Orders to Fountaindale came in quietly when I was on the phones, twelve or fifteen a month across the whole network, not a hundred. The drivers who run that side of Wyong shire knew the addresses by feel after a year.

How a Fountaindale Order Actually Moves

There is no warehouse on the highway sending these out. The arrangement comes from a partner florist's cool room, made the morning of delivery. That is the whole point of the network.

* What happens when your order hits our network.

After You Order

Once your order is in, our system routes it to a partner florist covering the Fountaindale area. They source the stems on the morning's run, build the arrangement, and run it out same day if you ordered before the cutoff. The cutoff is 2pm on a weekday and 10am on a Saturday. Saturday orders need to land a bit earlier because the florist is closing the shop after the last delivery run, not staying open all afternoon. The driver is the one who needs your notes the most. A clear gate code, a tip about which house number is easy to miss, the colour of the front door, any of it helps.

If something goes wrong, contact us within 24 hours. Photos of the arrangement to [email protected] or a call on 1300 360 469 is usually all it takes. Live chat is on the site too. Most issues resolve the same day.

From Siobhan

The bit that surprised me when we started doing this in 2009 was how often people would ring back not because something went wrong, but because the person they sent the flowers to hadn't called yet. Six hours, eight hours, still no reply. We have been there. Mum hasn't called because she's gone for a walk, or because she is quietly enjoying the bunch by the window before she gets her phone out. The flowers arrive when the driver gets there. The thank you arrives when the person is ready. Give it a day before you worry.

If a day passes and you still want a check, ring us. We can confirm the delivery time on our end and put your mind at rest without making the receiver feel chased.

ABN: 17 830 858 659