Sunflower Baskets in Dubai

Baskets with sunflowers in Dubai: the water is the whole job

A sunflower drinks harder than anything else likely to be standing beside it. The pith inside the stem is spongy, the leaves are broad, and between them they move more water in a day than any other common cut flower in the same basket. In a vase you can watch the level drop. In foam there is no level to watch, and the reserve is smaller than a vase of comparable size would hold.

Deliveries run 9 AM to 10 PM and take 2 to 4 hours across the city. Orders start at 250 AED, and payment goes through Apple Pay or cash to the courier.

Topping up

Pour slowly at the edge of the basket until the block stops taking water. A fingertip settles it quicker than looking does, since damp foam springs back and leaves the finger wet while dry foam crumbles under pressure. The surface dries first while the centre is still wet, so the top of the block tells you very little about what is underneath.

Daily is the rule, twice in heat.

A block that has gone dry right through overnight rarely comes back. Air enters the stem, the head drops, and no amount of water afterwards lifts it again. This is the one real failure this format has, and it is entirely avoidable.

"People ask how long it will last. The honest answer is that it depends on whoever tops it up, because nothing else in the week counts for as much."

— JFLOO florist

Heat outside, dry air inside

Summer here is a hot desert climate that reaches 40 °C, with high humidity along the coast on top of it. Every basket leaves the workshop fully soaked and goes out in insulated packing. That covers the drive to the door. Once the arrangement is indoors the problem changes shape, because air conditioning runs through most of the day and dry moving air pulls water off an open foam surface faster than still warm air does. A basket sitting under a vent in a Downtown flat or a DIFC office needs the second top-up even in January.

Three things shorten one of these faster than anything else:

• a block left dry for a full night
• a position in direct sun through glass, which heats the foam through the liner
• a steady draught from a vent across the heads.

None of the three is about the flower. All of them are about where the basket was put down in the first ten minutes.

The last few days

Petals go first while the disc stays firm and green on the reverse. The dried edge is better left alone, because a stripped disc looks worse than a fading one. Spent heads come out with their stems, and the socket is covered with a leaf, since the foam no longer feeds that point.

Often it is the block rather than the flowers that finishes one of these arrangements. Baskets with sunflowers in Dubai usually end that way: the foam dries at the edges, starts to crumble, and the seating goes before the looks do.

Diameter is worth thinking about at the point of ordering for the same reason. A wider bowl holds a larger block, a larger block holds more water, and a larger reserve is more forgiving of a day when nobody topped it up. The narrow builds that suit a desk in Business Bay are the ones that punish a missed evening, and we say so when an order is going somewhere nobody sits every day.

Depth matters as much as width. A shallow dish exposes most of the block to the air and loses water off the top surface all day, while a deeper bowl keeps the same volume of foam under a smaller opening. For an office where the arrangement is looked at from above, the shallow shape is the right one and the extra top-up is the price of it.

Stock varies through the year. Some batches come in with wider discs and thicker stems, others run smaller, and a basket of the same diameter is then made up of a different number of heads. Tell us which room it is going into and whether somebody is there daily to top it up, and we build the count to that.