### Tulip bouquets in Phuket: quantity does the work Tulips are sold and arranged in tens for a reason that has nothing to do with tradition. The flower carries one head on one stem with no branching and very little foliage of its own. Ten stems therefore give you ten points of colour and nothing else, while a rose at the same price brings leaves, side buds and bulk along with it. That arithmetic decides the order more than the shade does. A bunch that would look generous in roses looks thin in tulips, and the gap is wide enough that people who have only ever bought roses consistently under-order. We say so before the box is built rather than after it is opened. Twenty stems of a single colour look considered. Ten stems of five colours look like something picked up on the way home. > "The most common correction we make is upwards, and it is never about money. People simply do not expect ten tulips to look like ten tulips." > JFLOO florist The strongest version of this format is usually the plainest one. 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, and with tropical foliage the mismatch is obvious, since a broad glossy leaf beside a narrow grey one reads as two arrangements sharing a vase. Form matters more than most buyers realise, and it is worth asking about. The plain single kind gives the clean egg shape everybody pictures when they hear the word. Fringed and feathered types read as almost baroque and need space around them. Double forms look closer to a peony from across a room and open wider still as the week goes on. Kinds with pointed petals that flare outwards hold a sharper silhouette right to the end, which suits a photograph taken on the last day rather than the first. Colour behaves differently in this format as well, because there is so little foliage to break it up. Twenty white stems read as one clean shape from across a terrace. Twenty in mixed pastels read as noise, since nothing green sits between the heads to separate one from the next. Mixing two of those in one bunch usually muddles both. Each shape needs the eye to read it, and next to each other neither gets read. Simplicity is doing real work here, not saving effort. Where the bunch lands changes the count as much as the taste does. A hotel room table takes a modest bunch well, since the surface is small and the flowers are seen from close up. A dinner table by the sea needs either more stems or a lower vase, because the arrangement competes with plates, glasses and a view. For an airport arrival the practical size is whatever one person can carry through a terminal without turning it sideways. Height is the other thing to settle in advance. Tulip stems keep growing after they are cut, so a bunch that fits a vase exactly on the first evening stands noticeably taller by the third, and a straight tall glass copes with that far better than anything narrow at the neck. Orders run 9 AM to 10 PM, we cover the west coast in 90 to 180 minutes, and villas, marinas and airport routes have their own windows. Tulip bouquets in Phuket start at 2200 THB, with payment by bank card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PromptPay, bank transfer or cash to the courier in baht. Buy for the room and buy in numbers, and the rest of this flower looks after itself. Cold water, a shallow fill, the coolest spot in the house overnight and a half turn of the vase each evening will keep a good bunch going for about a week in air at 25 to 33 °C.