Flowers in Boxes in Boston

Flowers in boxes in Boston: hat boxes, flower bags and macarons

Flowers in boxes in Boston can bring something sweet: beside the hat boxes and flower bags, the section keeps its own line of macarons in boxes, so flowers and macarons arrive as one gift. Which shape to choose depends on whether the gift travels on with the person, sits on a table, or stays wherever it lands.

Carried down Newbury Street or set down on Beacon Hill: bag or hat box

A flower bag has its own handles, so it travels the way a handbag does: down Newbury Street, across Copley Square, wherever the recipient is headed next. A hat box is round, with a lid, and it is built to be set down rather than carried on, on a table or a windowsill in a Beacon Hill townhouse or a Back Bay flat.

The section also holds designer boxes and one shaped as a cylinder, the Designer Cylinder No. 1. What goes inside is up to the sender: the range here runs to white Ecuadorian roses, French roses, lisianthus, hydrangea and lilies, though none of that is fixed to any one box by name. A French rose is not a variety; a florist turns its outer petals back by hand. For a box built around particular flowers, a message to the florist brings back a design, a photo and a price before anything is paid.

A box with macarons is its own line in the section: flowers and something sweet in one order rather than two. It suits the office corridor along Boylston Street and Huntington Avenue, where the recipient is more likely to be at a desk than at home.

Etiquette guides in the US tend to keep gifts between colleagues modest, and anything for a close colleague is given quietly rather than announced. A gift for a boss is the trickier direction: guidance usually runs the other way, manager to team, and where an office does want to mark the day, a gift from the whole department reads better than one from a single sender. The message card is free, and the whole office can sign it.

A jute pot, a crate or a hanging basket where the gift will stay

Some formats are chosen to stay exactly where they are set down or hung: a jute pot, among them the Jute Pot "Piero", a wooden crate, and a hanging basket. None of them travel on with the recipient the way a bag does.

The stems sit in wet floral foam inside the pot or crate, so no vase is needed. The foam wants watering every day, a thin stream over the whole exposed surface, and the arrangement should not be tilted while that happens. compositions in jute pots and crates and hanging baskets cover the rest of what is meant to stay behind this way.

Where to start depends on the address and the occasion. A gift about to travel on works best as flower handbags, one about to be set down as hat boxes, and a gift that should carry something sweet alongside the flowers as macarons in boxes.