Flowers in Boxes in San Francisco

Flowers in boxes in San Francisco: a pot to keep or a hat box to carry

Flowers in boxes in San Francisco sometimes arrive in a jute pot rather than in cardboard under a lid. The section keeps its own line of compositions in jute pots, a gift that settles wherever it is first put down. Before choosing the flowers, it helps to decide whether this gift will travel on from here or stay exactly where it lands.

A hotel room, a hospital stay and an order placed from outside the city each bring their own basics, covered together with San Francisco's weather on the hotels, wards and the city's weather page.

Who carries it next: a hat box or a flower handbag

A hat box is round, with a lid, built to sit on a table, a sideboard or a lap rather than to travel far on its own. Inside, the stems stand in wet floral foam rather than water, so there is no vase to carry and nothing to spill crossing a room.

A flower handbag or tote is lifted by its own handles, the way any bag is picked up. This suits a gift meant to go further than the recipient's hands: into a car, onto a train, or home from an office at the end of the day.

The hat box line itself runs from a tall cylinder to a square box with a flat lid, so the shape on offer says more about where the gift will sit than about its size.

A jute pot is built to stay rather than be unwrapped and set aside: once the flowers are spent, it is still a plant pot worth keeping on a shelf, which is the idea behind the compositions in jute pots line. A wooden crate works the same way, left out long after the bouquet inside it has gone.

A hanging basket is meant to hang, from a hook or a bracket, rather than stand on a surface, which suits a porch or a window where floor space is already taken.

What fills a jute pot, foam or soil, depends on the composition, and each listing says which it holds.

Jumilia and reflexed French roses: what sits under the lid

A Jumilia rose carries one of the largest heads in the section, a bud opening up to seven centimetres across, pale at the base and pink along the edge of each petal. Kept well, it holds in a vase for close to two weeks, which suits a gift handed over once rather than rearranged daily.

A French rose is a label for a technique, not a separate variety: the florist turns the outer petals back by hand so the bloom sits open rather than closed in a tight cup. Either rose has usually travelled a long way before reaching San Francisco. Cut roses sold in the United States are mostly imported, with Colombia supplying more than six in ten stems and Ecuador close to a quarter, so a rose under a San Francisco lid has often flown in from one of the two.

Flower box delivery in San Francisco when macarons come too

The macarons in boxes line adds a box of macarons alongside the flowers, so the gift covers something to eat as well as something to look at, without a separate order.

A florist photographs the finished box before the courier sets off, and most orders are handed over the same day they are placed; the exact timing shows on the product page itself. Delivery is free within the centre, and a zone fee for addresses further out is added at checkout, set out under the delivery terms.

Once the box arrives, the foam inside wants water every day, in a thin stream across the whole exposed surface rather than just near the stems, and the box itself should never be tilted. Once foam dries out, it stops taking water properly, and San Francisco's fog and cool spells make that daily check worth keeping up.