Flowers for Loved Ones in Tel Aviv

Flowers for loved ones: browsing by person instead of by date

Most flower shops are organised around the calendar. You arrive with a date and leave with a bouquet. This section is organised the other way round, and it exists because a large share of these orders are placed from another country.

If you live abroad and your family does not, the calendar is the least useful thing you have. What you actually know is the person, the city they are in, and roughly when they will be home.

The two branches

For Loved Ones covers the inner circle: mother, wife, daughter, sister, grandmother, child, partner. Here the bouquet is read as a continuation of a relationship rather than a courtesy, which makes it hard to get wrong and easy to repeat. The third identical box of roses stops saying anything.

As a Token of Gratitude covers everybody else: a colleague, a manager, a friend, a teacher, a performer, newlyweds. The task there is the opposite — say thank you and nothing more. Size, colour and the wording on the card do most of the work.

Sending from a different time zone

Two things go wrong when the sender is several hours away.

The delivery slot is set in the recipient's local time, not yours. An order placed at nine in the evening for "tomorrow morning" can land at six a.m. or in the middle of the night, and a courier at the door at either hour is not a pleasant surprise.

The second is the phone number. If the only contact on the order is your foreign mobile, the florist cannot reach anyone when the recipient is out. A local number for the recipient, or for a relative nearby, is worth more than any upgrade in the bouquet itself.

Distance sets the format

The closer the relationship, the more freedom you have: unusual colour, an unexpected flower, a joke on the card. The further away, the more neutral it should be.

Distance also sets the size. At home a large bouquet goes in a vase and lives a week. At an office there is nowhere to put it and nobody wants to carry it home on a crowded train, so a boxed arrangement with water inside travels far better.

Frequency

The same recipient collects three or four bouquets from you a year. Varying the flower matters more than increasing the stem count: if March was red roses, May is more interesting as peonies, alstroemeria or an armful of gerberas. If someone in Tel Aviv receives flowers from you often, keep a note of what has already been sent.