Flowers to Tumbulgum, the Meeting of the Waters

What Actually Wrecks a Flood-Season Bouquet in Tumbulgum

Anna, qualified florist | 10,000-plus orders off the phones, and fifteen years on the bench before that

People think the enemy in a place like Tumbulgum is the rain, or the heat. It is neither. I learned the trade in North Carolina, about as humid a corner of the world as this one, so I worked out early what damp air really does to a flower. I have made my home down this way ever since, over at Casuarina, so the wet weeks here are not something I read about, they are on my own doorstep. The thing that quietly wrecks a bouquet here is the humidity that hangs in the air for days after a flood has come and gone. I heard that worry dozens of times on the phones, usually from someone up in Lismore who had watched their own street go under and could not picture how flowers would ever survive the week, let alone find the door. I told her the same thing I will tell you: the damp is workable, you just have to send the right flowers into it.

Here is the part most people get backwards. High moisture keeps petals hydrated longer than dry heat ever would, so the damp is not the problem on its own. Push that same humidity past about ninety per cent with a bit of warmth in the room, though, and you get botrytis, the grey mould that turns up as brown freckles on the outer petals of a dense rose or carnation a few days on. That is the mould settling in, not a bruise, and nothing the florist did wrong. Most of what reaches the Tweed comes up through the Brisbane market, but there are small growers right in the cane country around Condong too, so some of what lands has only travelled a few kilometres, which in a wet week is exactly what you want: less time in a truck is less time for the damp to get a head start.

So for a riverside cottage in a wet week I steer people toward chrysanthemum, carnation and leucadendron, the stems that shrug off damp, still air and just keep going. A carnation will give you the better part of three weeks in a cool spot. Keep the heavy oriental lilies out of a small room, the scent takes over. And if you do spot a freckled outer petal, pull it off. The bloom underneath is almost always fine.

How Your Flowers Reach a Tumbulgum Doorstep

There is no warehouse on the Tweed Valley Way sending these out. They are made the morning of delivery in a real shop, then driven over the same back roads a local would take.

* What happens to your order once it hits the network: a paid order to a partner florist, built fresh that morning, hand delivered.

The Day Andrew Lost the Dinghy on the Rous

Andrew takes his Dad out for a drive most Saturday mornings. They head through Cudgen, up past Chinderah, sometimes out to Murwillumbah and Uki, down the old Pacific Highway through Mooball, it all depends on the mood really of them both. Often they end up at The Blonde Baker in Tumbulgum for takeaway coffee. It's one of those spots that's just nice to sit at, right on the river, watch the water go by, chat about nothing in particular, but mostly about cars, or so they tell me.

His Dad's getting on now, so these drives have become a bit of a routine. Cup of coffee, bit of a yarn, head home, for him that is Casuarina. Tumbulgum's always been that kind of place, bit sleepy, bit forgotten, but properly beautiful if you stop and look at it. A pub that's been pouring since 1887, cane fields running back to Wollumbin on the skyline, a heritage trail you can walk end to end in forty minutes. There is one fixed bridge into the whole place, the Alexander Twohill, and before it went up in 1986 you crossed the river by ferry, which tells you how much Tumbulgum turns on the water. People passing through file it under Murwillumbah. It isn't. Different postcode, different town, its own flood gauge, and anyone local will put you straight on that.

Andrew tied up the tender. Well, he thought he tied up the tender. About half an hour later, Asha looks out and says, "um, where's the dinghy?"

* On the houseboat at Tumbulgum. Andrew and Asha had just landed a fish, moments before the tender set off on its own up the Rous.

A few years back we hired a houseboat from Tweed Houseboat Hire for a family trip. Got all our supplies from the shop, drinks, food, the works, and headed up the Tweed River. Late arvo we pulled into the Rous River, just across from Tumbulgum, dropped anchor for the night. Nice spot, quiet, good view of the town.

Sure enough, the tender had started its solo journey up the Rous. Andrew's face was something else, proper panic mode. We pulled anchor and started chasing this silly little boat floating upstream. The girls were NOT impressed. Ivy was giving Andrew the death stare, Asha was making very pointed comments about knot tying skills with a decent amount of eye rolling, standard for a 15 year old at the time. I was trying not to laugh because the whole thing was ridiculous, but also genuinely stressful, because if we lost that tender we'd have to pay for it.

Eventually we caught up to it where it got stuck in some debris from the last floods. Sticks and logs everywhere, the tender wedged in nicely. Andrew hauled it back, tied it up properly this time (triple checked), and we didn't speak about it for the rest of the trip. The girls bring it up occasionally just to remind him.

Here's the thing though. That debris the tender jammed into was left behind by the last floods, and it is the same current that carries a loose dinghy upriver that the gauge watches every wet season. So when our florists say they know which crossing floods first and which lane still holds, it is not a line off a website. This is our patch. We ran flowers around these roads ourselves in the early days, newborn asleep in the back, long before there was a network to do the driving for us. Still a lovely spot, that stretch of the Rous across from Tumbulgum. Even with the tender drama.

After You Order

Once you have ordered, it lands with one of our Tweed partners, who makes it that morning and runs it out. You are not left guessing about what goes out the door, if you want to know what the arrangement looks like before it lands, ring us and we will tell you.

If anything is not right when it arrives, take a photo and email us the same day at [email protected], or call 1300 360 469 between 7am and 6pm on weekdays and from 10am Saturdays. Same day is while we can still fix it.

From Andrew

The one thing we will not do is pretend the weather here is not a factor. When the river is up and the gauge is climbing toward the two-metre mark, the honest answer is your order might get held a day or rerouted, because driving flowers into a road that is closing helps nobody. We changed our own rule on this after a wet season taught us the hard way: we ring the sender before the flowers are late, not after. It is not complicated. It beats a driver stuck at a flooded causeway with a boot full of carnations.

We are a mum-and-dad business, Australian owned, with no call centre and no boardroom between you and the florist. Phone is quicker than email if the delivery is meant for today, and either way it is one of us or our own team who picks up.

ABN: 17 830 858 659