Flowers Delivered to Mosman, Rarely to a Front Door

The Humidity Coming Off the Harbour Is What Ends a Mosman Bouquet

Anna, qualified florist | trained in North Carolina, fifteen years spent spotting grey mould before it spreads

Most people sending to Mosman worry about heat. The harbour takes care of that. Observatory Hill, the long-record station for this stretch of the water, logs only three or four days a year over 35 degrees, and the breeze coming off Middle Harbour keeps the worst of a February afternoon off the doorstep. That salt air is mostly a friend to a bouquet, it holds moisture in the petals, so most stems last longer here than they do out in the dry western suburbs. The one thing it also brings, and the thing nobody watches for, is humidity, sitting in the low-to-mid seventies from January through June, and humidity works on a flower quieter than heat does.

The risk is botrytis. That is grey mould, and it starts as pinhead spots on the softest petals, garden roses and dahlias first. In a closed-up harbourside apartment on a still, humid day, the spores settle into a tightly-packed rose and take hold before the recipient is home from work. One morning the arrangement looks perfect. The next there are fuzzy grey patches on the petal edges and that bloom is gone in a day. A hundred-and-forty-dollar box of dense garden roses can grey out inside three days in the wrong room. If you do see grey spotting, do not write the bloom off as bruised and bin it. It is a surface fungus. Pull the outer petals and the flower underneath is usually fine.

So for Mosman I steer people two ways. Send stems that shed the damp: open-cut roses over garden roses, chrysanthemums, lisianthus, or natives if the address is a windy balcony out at Beauty Point or Clifton Gardens. And ask the florist to wrap it loose. Tight cellophane in this humidity traps the moisture against the petals and does the mould's work for it. A native bunch will outlast a box of peonies by a week on a Mosman windowsill. That one is not a close call.

How a Mosman Order Actually Gets There

There is no shop of ours on Military Road. When you order, the flowers are made that morning by a partner florist in or close to Mosman and driven round to the address, which is the whole point, they are fresh because they never sat in a warehouse waiting for you.

* What happens to your order once it hits the Lily's Florist network.

When Andrew and I first started sending flowers to the Lower North Shore in 2008, one florist over in Parramatta covered the entire Sydney metro, us included, which meant a Mosman order rode about as far across the city as an order can go. That worked while we were small. It stopped working as we grew, so by 2013 we had built the network out to more than 150 partner florists across Greater Sydney, and now a Mosman delivery is handled by someone already on this side of the water. We have never charged those florists a fee to be on it. They add a few stems to cover our commission, and every order that comes through this page goes to that one florist, not auctioned off to whoever is cheapest on the day. Shorter trip. Better flowers.

After You Order

Once you have placed the order, the steps are the same every time. We confirm it, match it to a partner florist in or close to Mosman, and they make it that morning before it goes out on the run. There is nothing else you need to do.

If the flowers land and you do not hear anything back for a day, that is normal. Older folks in particular do not always reach for the phone, and the gesture has done its work in that room whether they have managed to tell you yet or not. If anything actually looks off, the arrangement, the timing, the address, ring 1300 360 469 between 7am and 6pm on a weekday or email [email protected]. We would always rather hear from you while there is still time to sort it than read about it later.

A word from Andrew, the other half of Lily's Florist

Once your order is in, it is matched to a partner florist near Mosman and built that morning, the same way every order has gone out since 2008. There is no call centre here. Ring that number in business hours and you get me, or Siobhan, at a desk in Kingscliff, not a hold queue somewhere offshore. We are a Mum and Dad with two kids and a dog, and most decisions about how this place runs still get made at our own kitchen table. Stripped back, a bunch of flowers is just you getting to a door you cannot reach today. That is the whole job. The one thing that trips up a Mosman delivery is the addresses that are not on the street, the ones down a flight of sandstone steps or a driveway set well back from the road. We started asking for a landmark or a mobile number on those after enough drivers stood at the wrong gate. If something looks wrong, I would rather you rang me the same day than left it three days for a review. We can still fix it then.

For anything urgent the phone beats email, and someone is on it from 7am on weekdays, 10am on Saturdays.

ABN: 17 830 858 659