Tulip bouquets: buy them closed and buy them in numbers
The temptation at the counter is to pick the bunch that already looks like a photograph. Open cups, full colour, everything on show. That bunch is several days into its life and will be flat and starry by the weekend.
Buy the dull-looking one instead.
Reading the bud
A tulip you want is still shut, firm to a light squeeze, with the colour just breaking through the green at the top of the bud. It will open in the recipient's kitchen rather than in the van, which is the whole point of sending flowers rather than photographs of them.
Green all over is the other extreme and carries its own risk, since a bud cut too early sometimes never colours properly.
The leaves tell you as much as the flower. Tulip foliage should be stiff, greyish and squeaky between the fingers; limp or yellowing leaves mean the stems have been standing somewhere warm for too long, and warmth is what shortens the life of this flower more than anything else.
Quantity does the work
Tulips are sold and arranged in tens for a reason. The flower has one head on one stem with no branching, so ten stems give you ten points of colour and nothing else, while a rose of the same price brings foliage and bulk with it.
Twenty stems of a single colour look considered. Ten of five colours look like a supermarket bunch.
The strongest version of this format is usually the plainest. A single variety, a single tone, bound loosely and dropped into a tall straight glass, with the flower's own grey foliage left on to fill the middle. Greenery bought in for the purpose rarely improves it. Fussy wrapping fights the shape.
Variety matters more than most buyers realise. The ordinary single tulip gives the clean egg shape everyone pictures; parrot types are fringed and feathered and read as almost baroque; doubles look closer to peonies at a distance and open wider still. Lily-flowered kinds have pointed petals that flare outwards and hold a sharper silhouette to the end. Mixing two of these in one bunch usually muddles both.
Season and supply
Outdoors the flower belongs to spring, and the field season is short. Under glass it is grown from prepared bulbs across a much longer stretch of the year, which is why tulip bouquets turn up long before anything is flowering in a garden.
Choice narrows at the edges of the season rather than disappearing. Common colours stay available, unusual ones come and go, and stems tend to be shorter late in the run.
Warn the recipient about the movement
One thing is worth saying with the card, because otherwise it reads as a fault. The stems go on growing after cutting and they bend towards whatever light is in the room, so the tidy dome you paid for will lean and spread within a day or two.
Nothing is wrong when that happens. Cold water, a shallow fill, a cool spot at night and a half turn of the vase each evening keep the bunch upright for about a week. A recipient in Dushanbe who understands that the arrangement is meant to move will enjoy it far more than one who thinks it has collapsed.