### Sunflower bouquets in Dubai: the head, the water and the drive Summer here runs to 40 °C, with humidity off the coast on top of it, and deliveries cross the city in a 2 to 4 hour window. The box carries insulated packing and never waits in the sun. For most flowers that is the hard part of the day. A sunflower is tougher than that and its trouble starts later, once it is standing in water in somebody's flat. The head is the whole engineering problem. It is heavy, it sits at the top of a coarse hollow stem, and it drinks at a rate that startles anyone whose last bouquet was roses. Three habits cover almost all of it: - Top the water up every evening. A vase that runs dry overnight gives you a bent neck by morning, and the neck does not straighten again. - Keep the vase away from a bright window, since a cut sunflower still turns towards light and will show you the backs of its heads inside a week. - Recut with a knife rather than secateurs, which crush the soft core and seal it. > "The call always comes on day three. Nobody has moved the vase and nobody has topped it up, and by then there is nothing to do but shorten the stems." > (JFLOO florist) Catalogue orders start at 250 AED, payment goes through Apple Pay or cash to the courier, and deliveries run 9 AM to 10 PM. #### Where the vase goes in a cooled flat The window advice lands differently in this city, because the bright window is also the hottest surface in the room and the coolest air in the flat is usually pointed straight across the table from a vent. Both matter. Direct sun through glass dries the stem faster than the heat outside ever reaches the flower, and a steady cold draught pulls water out of the disc from the other side. Deep in the room, out of both, is the answer. It sounds dull and it buys days. Turning the vase a quarter turn each morning is the other half of it. A stem left facing one way bends towards the light along its whole length, and a bunch that stood straight on Monday leans by the weekend. Weight is the second local issue and it turns up at the address. Sunflowers need a substantial vessel, and a serviced apartment in Marina or a hotel room on Palm Jumeirah rarely has one. Ask before ordering, or send fewer stems with something to put them in. #### At the door These travel boxed with every head held separately. A bunch allowed to move around in transit arrives with bruised petals along one side, and no amount of arranging hides it afterwards. Feel the neck just under the disc when the box is opened. Firm is right. Soft has already gone, and that head will be looking at the floor by evening whatever anyone does for it. The hairs on the stem are the other thing to expect. They soften in water and cloud it quickly, so the water gets changed every second day and the vase gets washed out at the same time. Slime left on the glass is back in clean water within the hour. #### Season, and what to do when the date is fixed Sunflowers come off open ground through the second half of summer, and those are the weeks when the discs are widest, the stems longest and the petals firm instead of papery. Ordered well outside that stretch, the same bunch turns into a compromise: smaller heads, shorter stems, more money for less flower. If the date will not move, changing the flower usually beats insisting on the species. Yellow is the point more often than the sunflower is, and a bunch built on large headed chrysanthemums covers the same warm brief at full quality. Tell us the date, the address and whether there is a vase waiting. Sunflower bouquets in Dubai are simple to live with when those three answers arrive before the order is built rather than after it.