Baskets with lisianthus in Bali: the first two days, and the only job they hand over
An arrangement like this arrives half closed, and the person receiving it can be forgiven for thinking a mistake has been made. The open flowers sit at the top of the dome. The closed ones sit lower and further in, and the green of a tight bud still reads as foliage rather than as colour, so the bowl looks sparser than the picture it was ordered from.
Nothing has gone wrong. It simply has not started yet.
What the first two days do need is water, and more of it than any other point in the life of the basket. The block is giving moisture up to the air as well as to the stems, and in this climate the air takes its share quickly. On a covered terrace with the humidity high the surface still dries, because moving air over an open bowl does not care how much water is already in the room.
Top up at the rim in a thin stream until the block stops accepting it, and pour slowly enough that nothing runs over the weave. The check is made with a fingertip and not by eye: damp foam springs back under light pressure, dry foam crumbles. The surface can be dry to the touch while the centre is still saturated, which is why the finger goes in at the edge rather than resting on the top.
A block that has dried right through is the one situation that cannot be undone. It takes water back reluctantly and only along the outside, the stems sitting in the middle never reach what you poured, and the flowers show that loss inside a day.
"The only instruction that matters with this format is to touch the foam every second day. Nobody needs a vase, nobody needs scissors, and there is nothing else to remember."
— JFLOO florist
Getting one to the address in the state it left in
We build these on the morning they go out, and the stage of the buds is chosen against the length of the road.
Four routes cover most of what we send:
- Seminyak, Canggu and Sanur, inside a 90 to 150 minute window, where the arrangement can go out more open because it will be standing on a table within the hour.
- Uluwatu, Tabanan and the remote villas, up to 3 to 4 hours, which take a tighter planting.
- Nusa Dua hotels, including The St. Regis Bali Resort, The Legian Seminyak and Alila Villas Uluwatu, where staff hold the basket until the guest is in the room.
- An Ubud dinner, the one case where the hour of arrival is fixed by somebody else's booking.
Above 30 °C and in high humidity we wrap firmly and add a cooling element, and all of it comes off the moment the basket is set down. Leaving a lisianthus arrangement sealed on a warm terrace for an afternoon does more harm than the drive ever did. In the rainy season from November to March we add route time rather than route speed, since the block is heavy with water and a fast run over broken road unseats the outer stems.
Baskets with lisianthus in Bali do not wait on a shipment, since the flower is part of what we work with here alongside imported roses, orchids and macrophylla hydrangea. Orders start at 650000 IDR, payment goes through QRIS, GoPay, OVO, DANA or cash to the courier, and the working day runs 9 AM to 10 PM.
If the arrangement is going to a rented house in Canggu or a resort address where nobody knows the recipient's schedule, tell us the hour somebody will actually be there. A basket that stands unopened in a hallway spends its best two days on a floor tile, and those are exactly the days when the block still holds everything it was given.
