### Tulip bouquets in Bali: read the bud, not the photograph The temptation is always to choose the bunch that already looks like the picture. Open cups, full colour, everything on display. That bunch is several days into its life and will be flat and starry by the weekend. Photographs of tulips are taken at the wrong end of the week. What looks generous on a screen is a flower most of the way through what it had to give. Buy the dull looking one instead. A tulip worth sending is still shut, firm to a light squeeze, with the colour just breaking through the green at the top of the bud. It will open in the recipient's room rather than in the van, and that is the entire reason for sending flowers rather than a picture of them. The head should feel solid between two fingers, not hollow. Anything that gives under light pressure has already started to go. The base of the stem is worth a look as well. Tulip stems bruise where they have been gripped, and a bruised section turns soft and slightly translucent within a day. Any stem that was handled hard in packing is the one that bends below the head first. Green all over is the other extreme and carries its own risk, since a bud cut too early sometimes never colours properly at all. The leaves tell you as much as the flower does. Tulip foliage should be stiff, greyish and squeaky between the fingers. Limp or yellowing leaves mean the stems stood somewhere warm for too long before they reached you, and warmth is what shortens the life of this flower more than anything else does. Reading the bud matters more here than it would somewhere cool. Warm air pushes several buds open at once, so a bunch that leaves us at the right stage can arrive at the wrong one if it has spent three hours in traffic and then an hour waiting at a gate. That is why we cut the bud stage to the address rather than to the catalogue. Bud stage is also the thing we trade against the date. A bunch that has to look its best on Saturday leaves the workshop tighter than one being opened this evening, and those are two different builds rather than the same one delivered twice. Four things we ask before building the bunch: - The delivery address, since Seminyak, Canggu and Sanur sit at 90 to 150 minutes while Uluwatu, Tabanan and remote villas take up to 3 or 4 hours. - Whether the room is air conditioned. - The date the flowers need to look their best, which is often not the date they arrive. - Whether anyone will be there to put them in water. Tulips travel closed and the first hour in cold water does more for them than the rest of the week. Orders run 9 AM to 10 PM, prices start at 650000 IDR, and payment goes through QRIS, GoPay, OVO, DANA or cash to the courier. Above 30 °C the box carries firm wrapping and a cooling element, and between November and March it wants opening under a roof. > "People ask us for the bunch in the photograph. We show them the closed one next to it and explain that they are the same flowers four days apart." > JFLOO florist One thing to pass on with the flowers. The stems go on growing after cutting and they bend towards whatever light is in the room, so the neat dome that arrived will lean and spread within a day or two. Nothing has gone wrong when that happens, and a recipient who knows it is coming enjoys the bunch far more than one who thinks it has collapsed. Cold water, a shallow fill and the coolest room in the house at night are the whole of the care. Cut the stems straight across rather than at an angle, because a soft tulip stem laid diagonally sits flat on the base of the vase and blocks itself.