#### Water, stems and a humid room
Lily stems are thick, fleshy and thirsty. The level in the vase drops visibly over a day, which is the clearest signal any cut flower gives you about what it needs, and here it wants checking every morning. Three habits cover the whole of it:
- top the water back up daily and change it completely every second day;
- cut the stems at an angle with a knife, never with scissors, which crush the soft stalk;
- strip every leaf that would otherwise sit below the surface and rot there. That last one does more work in this climate than in a dry one. Warm humid air and submerged foliage turn a vase cloudy faster here, so the vase gets washed out at every change rather than once a week. An old cut is the usual reason a lily stops drinking. The stalk seals itself over with swollen tissue after a couple of days and no amount of fresh water gets past that, which is why the knife matters more than anything that arrived in a sachet with the box. Choose a vase with some weight in the base as well. These stems are tall and the open flowers sit wide, so a light glass jar starts to tip once the top half of the bunch fills out. Nothing beyond those habits is required of the recipient, and a lily bouquet given that much attention outlasts most of what stands beside it. 
Placement is the other half. Direct sun on a terrace and the draught from an air conditioning unit both push the buds open faster than they should, and a bunch that opens early finishes early. A shaded corner inside the room holds the flowers at the stage they arrived in. Above 30 °C and in high humidity we use firm wrapping and a cooling element on the way out. Closed buds handle the drive better than open blooms do, which is one of the reasons this format works on the long runs to Uluwatu and Tabanan, and during the rainy season from November to March we book the far addresses for the morning. Ocean villas and the resort addresses around Seminyak and Canggu account for most of these deliveries, with Nusa Dua hotels and Ubud dinners behind them. Wedding venues in Jimbaran order lilies earliest of all, since the bouquet has to be at a particular stage on a particular afternoon and the flower keeps its own schedule. Tell us whether there are animals in the house and where the vase is going to stand. Those two answers change what we build more than any other detail on the order form.