Tyagarah Flowers, Delivered Down the Right Driveway

Why the Wet Air Off the Reserve Decides What Lasts in Tyagarah

Anna, qualified florist | fifteen years spent working out which stems rot first in still, wet air

People blame the heat when a bouquet goes over. Heat speeds things along, but the flower that collapses first up here is the one that sat in air that never moved, and the properties out here back straight onto the reserve. Eight hundred and seventy-odd hectares of paperbark wetland and Tea Tree Lake hold moisture in the air long after the open coast at Byron has dried off in the sea breeze. I spent years on the phones from our old Pottsville office, and the callers sending up into this kind of country asked the same thing over and over: what will still be alive by the weekend. After a few hundred of those, I had the answer ready.

The trouble in a humidity pocket like this is botrytis, which is just grey mould. It starts as pin-spots on the softest petals, roses and dahlias first, and once it takes hold the whole bloom slumps inside a day. Wrap those same stems tight in cellophane so the air cannot move and you have built it a little greenhouse. Tight cellophane in this pocket is close to a death sentence for a dense-petalled bunch. A February afternoon out here sits around 28 degrees, and the wetland keeps the humidity up long after the open coast has dried. Get the stems wrong and a dense rose bunch that would give a Sydney flat a good week is browning by day three, before the person you sent it to has had a proper chance to enjoy it.

So for a Tyagarah address I lean on stems built for wet air: natives, chrysanthemums, carnations, waxflower, the leucadendron and banksia that already grow on the dunes here. They want a loose wrap and plenty of air around them. It helps that this coast is fed from the Brisbane market at Rocklea, a far shorter run than most people assume for a New South Wales address, so the hardy stems arrive with plenty of life still in them. One catch with the carnations and the waxflower, and hardly anyone thinks of it: keep them off the kitchen bench, away from the fruit bowl. Ripening bananas and apples give off a gas that makes both of them drop early, and moving them to another room fixes it. Send those and the flowers outlast the occasion. Send tight roses in a sleeve and you are gambling.

How a Tyagarah Order Actually Finds the House

The network your order runs on started small. It began with a single florist out near Murwillumbah who said yes to a strange idea back in 2009, and it has grown to more than 800 partners since. It still works the same way it did then.

There is no warehouse on a back road sending these out. A partner florist in or near the area builds your bunch that morning from a cool room, and then the real work starts, which is finding your person's gate.

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

After You Order

Once you have ordered, it goes to a partner florist in or close to the area as a paid order, they build it that morning, and the driver takes it out on the run with your gate notes in hand. There is nothing else you need to do.

If anything looks off, or you just want to check where it is up to, ring us on 1300 360 469 between 7am and 6pm on weekdays, 10am Saturdays, or email [email protected]. A phone call sorts it faster than a review three days later.

Andrew, on the years before we had people everywhere

For a long stretch of the early days we did not have someone of our own in every town on this coast. A partner florist over at Byron Bay ran the orders for most of this shire, right up until around 2013, and she had cheap couriers who made the trip daily, so it just worked. That is how flowers reached places like Tyagarah before the network filled in. One thing worth knowing while you wait: if you do not hear back straight away, that is normal. People out on acreage are not sitting by the phone, and the photo comes when it comes. Silence is not a bad sign.

We are a Mum and Dad business run out of the Northern Rivers, not a call centre in a tower, and if it matters that your order lands exactly right, the phone beats the form every time.

ABN: 17 830 858 659