Mixed Bouquets in Bali

Mixed bouquets in Bali: built to be taken apart

Anyone can judge flowers on the day they arrive. The more useful question is what they look like halfway through, once the shortest-lived variety has finished and the rest are still going. A mixed bouquet ages unevenly by definition, and whether that matters depends entirely on where the weakest stems were placed.

A good build assumes something will be removed.

Put the short-lived flowers at the edge or in a defined pocket and the bouquet can be edited without collapsing. Bury them in the centre and pulling one out leaves a hole nobody can close. Ranunculus is the usual candidate for early removal here, while lisianthus outlasts almost everything standing in the same water. Roses sit in between at roughly a week, provided the stems are cut and the water is changed. Matching the expected life of the components is the least visible decision in the whole bouquet and the one that decides how it is remembered.

The gap matters more than it sounds. One long-lived group beside one short-lived group looks tired days before most of it has actually finished.

Which is why the first principle of a mixed build is not variety at all. It is bringing the expected lives of the components into one range, and only then deciding what the bouquet looks like. A florist who does it the other way round produces something that photographs beautifully on the first morning and is unrecognisable by the weekend.

Mixed bouquets in Bali are ordered for addresses the sender has usually never seen. Delivery in Seminyak, Canggu and Sanur takes 90 to 150 minutes, Uluwatu, Tabanan and remote villas run to 3 or 4 hours, we work from 9 AM to 10 PM, orders start from 650000 IDR, and payment goes through QRIS, GoPay, OVO or DANA, or in cash to the courier.

Four lines in the order change the composition:

• The hour the recipient will actually see the flowers.
• Whether the bouquet is handed over or left with somebody.
• A villa, a hotel room or an office.
• How long it has to hold. A dinner in Ubud tonight and a villa taken for a fortnight are two different builds, and only the second one has to survive a week of being looked at every morning.

What the season and the road add

The wet season runs from November to March and the drier months from April to October. Above 30 °C, and in the humidity that comes with it, we use firm wrapping and a cooling element, which counts for most on the long routes where the flowers spend hours away from water.

Imported roses at 60 to 90 cm and Ecuadorian roses up to 120 cm take the dominant positions, macrophylla hydrangea fills volume with one stem, lisianthus and ranunculus support them, orchids hold longest, and tropical foliage draws the edge. Cut the stems on a slant on arrival, strip everything below the waterline, and change the water rather than topping it up.

"The question we ask is not which flowers you want. It is which day the bouquet still has to look right on."

— JFLOO florist

When half of it is finished, the survivors make a smaller arrangement that stands for several more days. Say at the time of ordering whether the recipient is likely to do that, because a bouquet meant to be edited and a bouquet meant for one evening are not tied the same way.