Flowers Delivered to Tallebudgera, Eighty Metres and All

The first flower question anybody ever asked me on the phone, I answered by turning around and saying "hang on, I will just check with my wife." Siobhan knew less than I did. Which is why there is a qualified florist on this page instead of a marketing paragraph about our passion for flowers. Anna was the first one we hired. She learnt the trade in North Carolina, moved out here with her Australian husband and their young kids, and was working for a tiny boutique florist at Salt in Kingscliff when we found her. Will came next, a highly awarded Sydney florist who had done his time in the CBD and Eastern Suburbs shops and wanted out of the city as badly as we had.

The Waxflower Will Punish You. The Leucadendron Will Outlive Everything.

Anna, qualified florist | she can pick the waxflower that will shatter before it ever leaves the bucket

People order natives because they assume natives look after themselves. Half right. A leucadendron will still be standing at three weeks if somebody keeps the water clean, and I have had them go longer than that. Waxflower off the same delivery is the most temperamental thing in the bucket. Let it run dry for one afternoon and it starts producing its own ethylene and drops its flowers off the stem, like it has decided to punish you for the oversight. I learned that the expensive way, on a bench at Salt in Kingscliff, about twenty five minutes up the road from where these end up.

Something in that review at the top of the page is worth stopping on. In roughly ten thousand calls I never once had somebody ring me back about a smell. They rang about colour. So bright, they would say, or the pinks were gorgeous. Colour first, then size, and that was more or less the whole list. Corinne's recipients rang about the smell, and natives are the only stems I ever sold that pull that off.

The oil is in the leaves. Eucalypt, and the tea tree that goes into a lot of the filler, hold it in little glands you can actually see if you hold a leaf up against a window, clear dots right through the middle of it. Brush past the vase, or shift it to wipe the table underneath, and those glands release again. Warmth pulls the oil out faster. A native bunch on a hot verandah in Tallebudgera smells enormous for two days and then smells of nothing at all, and the flowers can still be perfectly good while that happens.

Tallebudgera is its own pocket for this, and it is not the same pocket as the beach. The sea breeze that has Palm Beach cooled off by three in the afternoon does not get back up the valley, so warm damp air sits in there through the evening. Kind to a petal. Rough on a scent. Then somebody carries that same bunch inside to a big air conditioned lounge and the whole thing inverts on you. Transpiration, which is just the flower breathing water out, climbs about seven per cent for every degree over twenty one, and a vent pointed at a vase does more harm than the afternoon outside ever did. Natives shrug at both ends of that. A hydrangea in the same room is done by Wednesday.

So, two rules. Keep it out of direct sun if you want the scent still working next weekend. And change the water more often than feels necessary, because a protea will drink a vase dry inside two days and then blacken its own leaves pulling the sugar back out of them to feed the head. Get those two right and natives outlast anything else I could put in front of you in this climate. Get them wrong and you have paid a hundred and twenty odd dollars for sticks.

How an Order Into the Valley Actually Moves

Corinne, whose review sits at the top of this page, rang us from the ACT. Her kind of call is the reason this business exists at all.

When we bought the Kingscliff shop in 2006 we inherited the previous owner's Yellow Pages advertisement. The book. Two of them, depending which side of the border you were on. We had no idea it was there until the phone started and would not stop, twenty odd calls a day, from Canberra and Townsville and Coffs Harbour, every one of them wanting flowers somewhere we could not reach. We resented those calls. They were eating the day. One quiet June morning in 2007 we fielded twenty five of them and took less than twenty five dollars over the counter, most of it discounted soap, and somewhere in there the resentment turned into a question. For about two years all we did was apologise. It took until 2009 to do the obvious thing and ring florists in those towns to ask whether they would take the order instead. Every one of them said yes.

We could not actually afford to build those florists their websites. What paid for it was baby bottles. A mate's wife mentioned over lunch that American parenting forums were melting down about BPA in baby products and that the panic was heading here. We registered a domain that same afternoon, filled the shop and then our entire two storey villa at Casuarina to the ceiling with BPA free bottles, and for about a year we were the only supplier in the country. We ended up on the Today Show. We were wheeling a Woolworths trolley into the Casuarina post office several times a day, which in 2009 was not a thing anybody did. Asha probably still has a twitch from the sound of the packing tape at one in the morning. Every cent of it went into flower websites.

We charge those florists no fees. The arrangement, from the very first one, is that they put a few extra stems into the bouquet to cover our commission, and we were upfront about it from the first phone call. So our commission gets paid in flowers, by the florist, into the bunch you ordered. It is the only part of this business that has never changed.

The machinery around it has. The first version of the flower side ran out of the spare bedroom at Casuarina on an old Eftpos machine, Word documents and a fax. Yes, a fax. We would type up every order and fax it to the florist.

By Valentine's week 2011 we had built a home office into the garage at Pottsville and the two desks in it had become six, plus two more jammed in the middle for a couple of friends we had press-ganged into helping. The phones went from half past six in the morning and did not stop. Siobhan was eight and a half months pregnant with Ivy. Somewhere in the middle of it one of those friends, Jody, looked up at the room and said: OMG, what have you created? Here is what it looks like now.

There is no warehouse on the Gold Coast Highway with your name on a box. The flowers come out of a florist's cool room, built the morning they go out, and the run into Tallebudgera is somebody's actual afternoon.

* The whiteboard version of what happens to an order the moment it lands with us.

Which Side of the Creek Your Street Is On

I have been driving out to that creek since Asha was small. Every Saturday, up to the Gold Coast Recreation Precinct on the Tallebudgera Creek side, both our girls playing for the Tallebudgera Netball Club on the courts there, then the drive home. She started coaching the little kids there at fourteen. She works there now, which means I no longer have to do the drive, and I have complicated feelings about that.

Twenty years of that run is why I know the next bit. Tallebudgera Creek is Yugambeh for good fish, and it still runs this place more than the beach does. It also splits the suburb into two completely different delivery jobs, and everyone who lives here knows exactly which side of that line their street is on. Everybody else finds out once.

The creek is the one thing on this page I cannot engineer around. What I can do is know about it before you do. Roughly nine months of the year Tallebudgera is one of the easiest runs on the southern Gold Coast: wide streets, no towers, no intercoms, no concierge desk to argue with. The other three months, a handful of days genuinely close the valley, and pretending otherwise would just mean you find out on your recipient's birthday instead of on this page.

After You Order

Once you press order it goes out as a paid order to a florist in or near Tallebudgera, usually inside half an hour. They build it that morning off what came in from the market, and it goes onto the afternoon run. You get an email from us when it is on its way. You will not get a photo of it. The florist is making flowers, not content.

Here is the one we get wrong. A few days every wet season, Tallebudgera Creek Road goes under and the upper valley is not reachable by anybody, us included. We used to let those orders sit and hope the water dropped. Sit and hope is not a plan. Anything going to a valley address on a day like that now gets a phone call from us before we let it go, and you pick: hold it for tomorrow, or send it somewhere that still works today. Nobody enjoys making that call. It beats you finding out on Thursday.

Siobhan, on the quiet bit afterwards

The part nobody warns you about is the silence. You have paid, the confirmation is sitting in your inbox, and then nothing happens, and by about four o'clock you are wondering whether you typed the street number right. Most recipients do not ring the sender back the same day. They are at work, or asleep, or they have taken a lovely photo and left it sitting in their camera roll (which I do constantly). The flowers have already done their bit in that room whether she has managed to tell you yet or not. If it has been a day and it is still nagging at you, ring us and we will find out for you. Not a bother. It is one phone call.

Phone is faster than email for anything same day. 1300 360 469, 7am to 6pm weekdays, 10am Saturdays. For anything that can wait until morning, [email protected].

ABN: 17 830 858 659