Flowers Delivered to Urunga, Desk, Ward or Front Door

Why the Wettest Town on This Coast Is Kind to Most Flowers

Anna, qualified florist | fifteen years on the bench, and I still check the fruit bowl first

People hear Urunga gets more rain than almost anywhere on this coast and assume flowers turn up half-finished. It works the other way for most of a bunch. Urunga sits where two rivers, the Bellinger and the Kalang, meet the sea. The name is Gumbaynggirr for long white sands, after the sandbars at the two river mouths, and that estuary air carries moisture. Petals hold their water for longer in damp air than they do in dry inland heat, so a gerbera or a chrysanthemum will sit happy on a Urunga windowsill for days.

The trade-off shows up on the dense, many-layered blooms. Garden roses and dahlias, the tightly packed doubles. In humidity above about ninety percent, grey mould, what florists call botrytis, sets up on the outer petals as small brown spots. Here is the part people get wrong. Those spots are surface mould, and the bloom underneath is usually clean. Pull the marked outer petals off and the flower is fine.

One rule I give everyone, and it has nothing to do with the weather. Keep the vase away from the fruit bowl. A bowl of ripening bananas or apples gives off ethylene, an invisible gas that ages cut flowers faster than a hot day ever will. In a small retiree kitchen the vase and the fruit end up on the same bench, and I have watched a good bunch fold in half the time it should have. Flowers at one end, fruit at the other. That one is free.

How an Order Gets From the Market to a Urunga Doorstep

There is no Lily's shop on Bowra Street. Your order goes to a florist working in or near Urunga, who builds it the morning it goes out and drives it over. We are the bit in the middle that makes that happen the same day.

* What actually happens after you press order. Market, to cool room, to bench, to door, usually inside a day.

The whole model started with calls exactly like the one you might be about to make. Back in our Kingscliff shop in 2007 the phone rang all day for flowers to places we could not reach, Taree, Coffs Harbour, further out again. We could not fill them, and it bothered us enough that we went and built something that could. This coast is part of the reason Lily's exists at all.

Urunga sits about halfway between the Sydney and Brisbane flower markets. Most weeks the stems travel up the highway by refrigerated road, which puts them on a bench near you a day or so after they were cut. Fresh, just not picked that hour. Anyone who tells you their online-ordered flowers were grown down the street is having a lend of you.

One honest note, because it matters here. If you want a shop to walk into and point at a bucket, that is Softscape on Hungry Head Road. Donna is the florist in town and she is good at it. What we do is a different job. We get flowers to a Urunga address the same day when you are the one who cannot be there to choose them in person. Different tools for different problems.

After You Order

Once you press order, it stops being a website and becomes a job. It goes to a partner florist in or near Urunga as a paid order, they build it that morning, and it goes out on the Bellinger Valley run, same day if it is in by 2pm on a weekday or 10am on a Saturday. There is nothing else you have to do.

If it turns up and something is off, email a photo the same day to [email protected] or ring 1300 360 469 between 7am and 6pm. I would rather sort it that afternoon than read about it in a review a week later, when the flowers are long gone and there is nothing left to fix. On a country run, the thing that goes wrong is almost always timing. We used to promise same-day on regional orders the road or the cutoff could not back, so we stopped. A Urunga order that cannot make today now gets flagged before you pay, while there is still time to change it.

A word from Siobhan

That waiting bit, after you have ordered and before anyone tells you it arrived, is the part I still find hard when I send flowers to my own family down the coast. So if a day goes by and your person has not rung to say thank you, try not to read anything into it. Older folks often just pop the flowers in a vase and forget there was a sender attached. If you want to know it landed, ring us and we can check. It will not be a call centre. You get one of the two of us, still running the whole thing off the kitchen table between school runs.

Phone is quicker than email if it is time-sensitive. Either way, a real person picks it up.

ABN: 17 830 858 659