### Lilac bouquets in Bali: a woody stem and a season that will not wait Almost everything people find difficult about this flower comes from one fact that nobody mentions at the counter. The stem is not a stem. It is a branch off a shrub, with bark on the outside and a narrow conducting layer just beneath it, and it drinks nothing like a rose or a lisianthus. A plain diagonal cut, the one that works for every other flower in the box, exposes almost none of that layer. Water then has no way in. The branch stands in a full vase looking well cared for and dries out anyway, which is why the failure is so often blamed on the supplier. The signature is easy to recognise once you have seen it. The smallest florets at the tip of the panicle go papery first while the lower flowers still look sound, so the spike appears to be running out of time rather than out of water. Catalogue prices start at 650000 IDR, payment goes through QRIS, GoPay, OVO, DANA or cash to the courier, and orders run 9 AM to 10 PM. > "We write the two cuts on the card now. Strip the bark, split the end. Before we did that, half the complaints about lilac were about a knife that was never used." > JFLOO florist Preparation is a little brutal by comparison with anything else in the vase. Strip the bark from the bottom few centimetres with a knife, right around the branch, so the conducting layer is open on all sides. Split the cut end lengthways, once or twice, crossways if that is easier. Give the vase warm water for the first hour and ordinary room temperature water after that. Do not crush the end with a hammer, because smashed fibre rots and closes the very channels the split was meant to open. Then take the leaves off. Lilac foliage is large and thirsty and pulls water towards itself and away from the flowers, so a florist leaves two leaves for shape at most and usually none at all. A bare branch looks strange for about a day, and then it outlasts the leafy one standing beside it. Three things happen at the vase, and all three are worth doing: - The bark comes off the bottom few centimetres. - The cut end gets split lengthways, and split again at every water change. - Almost all the foliage goes in the bin. Season is the constraint after that, and it is the one nobody can work around. Lilac flowers once a year, gives its branches over a matter of weeks in late spring and then goes back to being a green shrub until the following year. Branches forced under glass outside that window look convincing and smell of very little, which matters when the scent was the reason for choosing it. We confirm what is actually available before an order is paid for rather than after. Expectations are worth setting with the card rather than after the phone call. Somebody used to roses holding for a fortnight will read a lilac branch finishing on day four as a fault, when it is simply what this flower does. One line on the card changes how the whole gift is received. Delivery follows the usual island split. Seminyak, Canggu and Sanur sit at 90 to 150 minutes, Uluwatu, Tabanan and villas further out take up to 3 or 4 hours, and above 30 °C the box goes out with firm wrapping and a cooling element. Between November and March it arrives wet on the outside and wants opening under a roof. Even prepared properly, lilac bouquets in Bali hold for a few days rather than a week. Change the water daily, split the end again each time, and expect the panicle to finish from the tip downwards.