Picture this: it’s 3am, the moon is in the sky and it’s pretty darn cold (you’re in Melbourne after all), you cross the street to your van, fumbling with your keys and stifling a yawn. This is how it all begins – pretty romantic and fun, huh?
What goes into us selecting flowers for your daily blooms is so, so much more than just buying a few bunches of pretty things at the market – believe me!
So, you’re in the van, you’re pumping that heating even though at this point it is just stale air and you’re switching on your favourite artist at the moment to wake you up for a fun day of florals and creating – thank god for Bluetooth (for me right now it’s a blend of Ariana Grande, Camp Cope, Mac Miller, and something loud with lots of yelling). You make your way to Epping, where our beautiful growers and wholesalers have already been there all night getting everything picked, prepped, packed and ready for the market.
This is where the fun part begins! Don your fluoro vest and start the party vibes because now you’re in the market, surrounded by what you love, with booming voices and rushing florists and the most beautiful blooms around.
When we prepare for the market the day before, we work out the numbers of what we anticipate to sell in a day (sometimes we are crazier than expected and run out of flowers which is why we might need to sell out early, sorry guys!), we figure out what days we are going to buy for (we usually buy for that morning and the next day to make sure everything is as fresh as possible) and we get a recipe together that helps us create the perfect bunch.
We have been doing this for a while now, so we have figured out the best combo of blooms to create our daily bunches.
It all starts with a feature flower, this is the biggest bloom in the bunch, the focal point of our littles and the flower that leads the way for the rest of them! This is basically whatever catches our eye on the day – I tend to look out for something new, a little special, and usually a beautiful colour. Recently our little’s featured an amazing deep red Protea that had white around the rim of each petal – they took my breath away!
Sometimes as a florist you get a little bit bored with using the same kind of bloom all the time and for me that bloom is Proteas – so when I saw these bad boys I snatched them up and let them take the lead in the bunch. What followed was a selection of blooms in matching colours, themes and price points (we like to keep it affordable, after all). Since the Protea was such a deep red, I decided to create a selection of reds, pinks and purples and bought blooms to match; we ended up with a great selection of Roses, Erica, Stock and Carnations in vibrant hues that made a beautiful, deep and romantic looking posy. Pretty neat, huh?
We are always on the hunt for something special – we like to keep it seasonal to keep prices low (for example in Winter you will notice we use Stock a lot in our bunches, this is because it is a) beautiful, b) available in tonnes of colours, c) affordable because it’s in season, and d) readily available to us. You won’t see us popping a Peony in bunches in April because they are out of season, and even if we did have them they would be darn expensive because they would be imported from somewhere else (fun fact: Holland and Israel are usually where Peony imports come from).
Once all the blooms are bought (this usually takes a few hours of scouring, sourcing and planning at the market), we pack them back into that van I mentioned previously, drive back to our studio and begin unpacking. We unpack them from their packaging, strip any leaves or thorns off the stems, give them a healthy cut on an angle at the base of the stem and then pop them straight into cool, fresh water. Then sigh, relief – you finished your market run!
Buy a coffee, pump some tunes, and get back into it because now it’s time to start making all the deliveries for that day! ;)