Vase life on a table and travel resilience are two different qualities and people confuse them constantly. A flower can last ten days in water and still be ruined by six hours on a warm apron. Another can look unpromising in the box and give you a week once it opens.
What follows is how they actually behave, shipped dry and cold from Holland, opened two days later on a boat.
Travels superbly
- Phalaenopsis and cymbidium orchids. The best value on any consignment. Ship them as potted plants or as sprays, and they give three to six weeks on board. If a boat is going somewhere with no supply at all, this is where the money should go.
- Anthurium. Practically indestructible, holds two to three weeks, and the modern colours are far from the red hotel plant people remember.
- Chrysanthemum and santini. Unfashionable and enormously useful. They arrive perfect and they outlast everything.
- Carnations, the good ones. Not the petrol station kind. Dianthus in the right colours travels flawlessly and lasts.
- Protea, leucadendron and the South African family. Built like furniture. They travel to the other side of the world and look as though nothing happened.
- Aspidistra, monstera, palm and structural foliage. Travels well and is exactly what you cannot always buy locally in a usable size.
Travels well if handled properly
- Roses. The workhorse. They ship dry and closed and open on board, which is what you want, but they are unforgiving of a broken cold chain. Roses are the flower that tells you whether your supply chain is honest.
- Lisianthus, which the auction sells as eustoma. Excellent traveller and a long life on board. Buy it with buds still to come.
- Ornithogalum. Very long lasting, ships well, and one of the most useful fillers you can put on a boat.
- Zantedeschia, the calla. Ships well but bruises if packed carelessly, and a bruised calla stem shows. Worth specifying good packing.
- Gerbera. Fine in transit, needs its neck supported. Ask for it shipped in a grid.
- Veronica, gypsophila and solidago. All reliable, all useful, none of them exciting.
Fragile, and worth it anyway
- Peonies. Ship tight, in bud, and time them. A peony bought properly closed will open on board over three or four days and there is nothing else like it. A peony bought already open is a two day flower after a flight.
- Ranunculus and anemone. Beautiful, delicate, short. Order for the day they are wanted rather than as a staple.
- Garden roses. Everything a rose is, more so, and less forgiving. Worth the trouble for an owner who knows the difference.
- Hydrangea. Travels acceptably and then wants water constantly. Condition it hard on arrival, deep water, and it will behave.
Not worth flying
- Sweet pea, lily of the valley, poppies. Wonderful, and effectively untransportable at this distance. Enjoy them in Antibes in spring.
- Anything already fully open. A flower ships as a promise, not as a finished thing. If it is open on the auction floor it is over before it reaches you.
- Tropicals, into the tropics. Heliconia, ginger and bird of paradise grow where your boat is. Flying them from Holland is spending money to make something worse.
- Bulk greenery you can buy locally. Freight is priced by volume, not weight, and foliage is nearly all volume. Fly the flowers, buy the greens where you are.
Plants are the exception to all of this
Everything above is about cut stems, which are cut material in a box with a finite life. A plant is a different proposition. It travels in its pot, it arrives with its roots intact, and it does not care that it spent two days in the dark.
That is why a phalaenopsis is worth more to a boat going foreign than almost any cut flower: two to three months of flower from one delivery, no weekly replacement, and no argument about what survived the flight. For an interior that has to look right through a whole winter season, plants carry the load and cut flowers do the moments. How to keep them alive on board is here.
The three things that decide the outcome
Cold, unbroken
Between plus two and plus eight, from the auction floor to the passerelle. Not cold, then warm for four hours at an airport, then cold again. Flowers do not recover from that, they just take a few days to show it.
Bought closed
Everything on a long haul consignment should be bought tighter than you would buy for the same day. It is the single biggest difference between a box that gives you five days and a box that gives you two, and it is a buying decision made in Holland, not a care decision made on board.
Conditioned on arrival
Flowers arrive dry and closed. Cut a centimetre off every stem under water, into clean cold water in the coolest room you have, and leave them alone for two to four hours before touching them. Do not arrange straight out of the box. Nearly every complaint about flown flowers comes from arranging them in the first hour.
And send the dry goods
The flowers are half of it. Foam, tape, wire, water tubes, trays, containers, stones, cellophane. On a boat in Falmouth or Malé there is no shop, and running out of foam is a worse afternoon than running out of roses. Every consignment we send carries a box of it.
If you want the paperwork side of how this all moves, that is here.