### Gladiolus bouquets in Dubai: buy it closed and let it open Most bouquets are at their best on the day they are handed over and go downhill from there. A gladiolus spike works the other way round. It arrives with a row of tight green buds and one or two open flowers at the bottom, and it spends the following week opening upwards, a bloom or two a day, until the colour has climbed most of the stem. That changes how you time an order. A spike already open along its whole length has been sitting somewhere for days and has little left to give. The right bunch looks slightly disappointing in the shop, green above and barely coloured below. Send it a day or two before the occasion and the recipient watches it come into flower instead of watching it fade. For a birthday it is one of the few flowers that genuinely rewards arriving early. The top of the spike is the weak part of that plan. Plants often run out of energy before the last buds open, so the tip stays green and shrivels while the flowers below are still working. Pinching out the very tip solves most of it. Take the last centimetre or so between finger and thumb on the day the bunch goes into water, and the buds below inherit what would have gone to the top. It looks brutal the first time. The spike keeps a clean line afterwards and finishes the row instead of trailing off into brown, and anyone assembling a bunch professionally will have done this already, so check the tips when the flowers arrive. #### Ordering ahead in this city Delivery takes 2 to 4 hours across Downtown, Business Bay, Marina, JBR, Palm Jumeirah and DIFC, and we work 9 AM to 10 PM. Orders start at 250 AED, with payment by Apple Pay or cash to the courier. Timing matters more than speed on this flower. A same-day gladiolus is a closed spike arriving on the day of the party, which is exactly the wrong way round, so we ask for the date of the occasion and work backwards from it. Summer heat is the other timing question. With the city reaching 40 °C and humidity along the coast, warmth pushes the row open faster and then cuts it short, so a spike sent two days early in high summer behaves like one sent on the morning itself in a milder month. Once it is in water the routine is short. Change the water every couple of days, re-trim at an angle, and pick the spent flowers off the bottom each morning, because they go slimy and take their neighbours down with them. The people ordering these are mostly sending to a generation that recognises the flower. It reads as a straightforward gesture to somebody who grew up with it and as an unfamiliar architectural stem to somebody who did not, which is worth thinking about before one goes to a colleague. Four things to settle before the order goes in: - The date of the occasion, which is not always the date you want it delivered. - How closed you want it. Almost entirely green is normal and correct. - Whether there is a tall heavy vase at the address. - The number of stems. An odd number at mixed heights reads better than an even row levelled off at one. > "Nobody is happy with a gladiolus in the shop. They ring on Thursday, when the colour has climbed halfway up the stem, and that is the call we are waiting for." > JFLOO florist Tell us the date and we will pick the spikes to match it. Green at the top on the day of delivery is the sign the order was built correctly, and the tips will already have been pinched before the box was closed.