Every winter the same conversation happens on a hundred boats. The interior wants flowers to the standard they ran all summer in the Med, the island florist can supply some of it, and the gap between the two gets filled with whatever is available. Then somebody suggests preserved flowers, on the grounds that fresh ones cannot survive out here.
Fresh flowers survive out here perfectly well. What does not survive is a supply chain that was never designed for it. Those are different problems and they have different answers.
What the islands genuinely have
Caribbean islands are not short of flowers. They are short of the particular flowers a superyacht interior is built around, in the quantities a superyacht needs, on the day it needs them.
What is generally available locally, and often beautiful:
- Tropicals. Heliconia, ginger, anthurium, bird of paradise, cordyline and croton foliage. These grow here, they are fresh, and they are strong. A good local florist can do remarkable things with them.
- Local greenery in quantity, which is genuinely useful and travels badly from Europe anyway.
What is thin, unreliable, or absent:
- Roses in any quantity or quality. They are imported to the islands too, which means you are buying somebody else's air freight, at their margin, several days after it landed.
- Peonies, ranunculus, garden roses, lisianthus, hydrangea. The European palette most owners actually want.
- Phalaenopsis and cymbidium in quantity and in condition.
- Anything at all in the two weeks that matter. More on that below.
Island by island
Sint Maarten
The best-supplied island in the eastern Caribbean, because everything arrives here anyway. Local florists are competent and the airport handles perishables. If you are on the Dutch side and your requirements are modest, you can often work locally. It is also the easiest place to land a consignment from Holland once the import permit is on file, which makes it the sensible landing point for St Barths too.
St Barths
There are real florists in Gustavia and they do good work. But the island is small, everything they sell arrived by boat or light aircraft, and in the two weeks either side of New Year the demand from the villas alone exceeds anything the island holds. A boat in Gustavia for New Year that has not planned flowers in November is competing with every villa on the island for the same stock.
Antigua
Decent local supply. Enough for a normal week. Not enough for the Charter Yacht Show, when the entire charter fleet is alongside in Nelson's Dockyard and Falmouth wanting flowers on the same two mornings, with brokers walking through them. That week is planned in October, and the permit alone takes 5 to 7 working days.
The Grenadines, Tortola, St Thomas
Thin. There is supply, but it is limited in range and volume. For a boat that wants a particular look sustained over a charter, this is flown in territory. Bequia and Mustique in particular are lovely places to be and difficult places to buy forty stems of anything specific.
Worth knowing before you plan: all three need an import permit, and St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands runs American plant import rules, the heaviest paperwork in the Caribbean. A permit takes 5 to 7 working days and has to exist before the flowers can be bought, so these are the islands where a late decision genuinely costs you. Plan it once and it covers the season, but it has to be in place before the first order lands. The country by country picture is here.
The weeks when nothing is available
Christmas and New Year, and again for the St Barths Bucket in March. In those weeks island supply does not degrade, it runs out. Every villa, every hotel and every boat wants flowers at once on islands whose entire stock arrives on a small number of aircraft. The only reliable way to have proper flowers in Gustavia on the 31st of December is to have decided about it in November.
What actually breaks flowers in the tropics
Heat is real and it is worth being clear about where the damage happens. It is almost never on the boat. Air-conditioned interiors on a superyacht are a better environment for cut flowers than most houses in Europe.
The damage happens in the gaps: a box on a hot apron waiting for someone to clear it, an hour in an unrefrigerated van, a night in a warehouse because the paperwork was not with the agent in time. A consignment held between plus two and plus eight from the auction floor to the passerelle arrives in the condition it left in. One whose cold chain breaks twice does not.
So the argument that fresh flowers fail in the Caribbean is really an argument that badly shipped flowers fail in the Caribbean. Which is true, and is not the same claim.
The sensible way to run a winter
Not everything has to be flown in, and pretending otherwise wastes money.
- Buy tropicals and greenery locally. They are fresher, cheaper and better than anything you could fly in, and they look like where you are.
- Fly in the European palette, the orchids, and anything the owner specifically expects. That is what the island cannot do.
- Fly in the dry goods with them. Floral foam, tape, wire, water tubes, trays, containers. There is no shop to walk to, and running out of foam in Falmouth is a worse problem than running out of roses.
- Plan the two big weeks in advance and treat everything else as normal.
That is roughly how the boats that get this right actually run it, and it is what we ship. The winter ports are here.