#### Season and colour
The spike grows from a corm and comes into its own outdoors in late summer and early autumn, which is when the stems are longest and the choice of colour widest. Glasshouse crops cover the rest of the year at a shorter length, so the same order placed six months apart can arrive noticeably different in height. Colours run from white and cream through peach, salmon, pink and scarlet to a purple that is nearly black. Ruffled edges are common in modern varieties and read as fussier than the plain forms do. Three things worth knowing before you choose:
- Shorter stems out of season are not a fault. That is the crop. - One colour at mixed heights reads better than several colours levelled off at one. - The near-black purples lose their detail in a dim room and want light on them. Numbers matter as much as height. Five or seven spikes already read as a wall of flower, while a dozen crammed into a narrow neck fight each other and splay outwards, which undoes the vertical line you were paying for. Care itself is one habit. Pick the spent flowers off the bottom each morning, change the water every couple of days, and keep the vase away from fruit, since ethylene drops the upper buds before they open. #### One caution about how it is read
In several countries the spike is a fixture of funeral work, so it carries a formal and sometimes sombre association for older recipients. That has nothing to do with the flower and everything to do with where somebody grew up, and it is worth asking before a large sheaf of them goes out to celebrate something. For a younger recipient the association is simply absent, and the spike reads as an architectural flower and nothing more. #### Getting it to the address
Seminyak, Canggu and Sanur take 90 to 150 minutes; Uluwatu, Tabanan and the villas further out take up to 3 to 4 hours. We work 9 AM to 10 PM. Above 30 °C, and in the humidity that comes with it, we use firm wrapping and a cooling element. Boxes stand upright, always. A spike laid flat curls at the tip within hours and never straightens, so a tall box is the only packaging this flower gets from us, and on the long runs it is braced before the van moves. 
Tell us the vase and the wall it is going against, and the stems get cut to that height before the box leaves. If there is no heavy vase at the address, say so: we will send fewer spikes at a shorter length, which makes a better bouquet than a tall one lying across the floor.