### Pink peonies in Bali: what comes off the stem and what goes back A peony arrives with its own leaves attached. They are large, coarse and dark, cut from the same stem as the bloom, and most people assume they belong in the finished bouquet because they came with it. Most of them come off during assembly. Part of the reason is water: leaves drink what the flower needs, and a stem carrying a full set of them opens more slowly and drops sooner. The rest of the reason is visual, since their weight and their dark green pull the eye down to the bottom of the bunch and away from the heads that were the point of the order. > "Everyone notices the leaves we take off and nobody notices the ones we leave. That is roughly the correct outcome." > JFLOO florist Stripping is never total, all the same. A leaf or two left high on the stem, just under a head, gives the flower something to sit against and stops a tight bunch from looking like a row of heads on sticks. What goes back in depends on the temperature of the pink. A cool blush or a lilac pink sits well beside grey green material that shares its coolness, while a warm pink with a peach base wants plain mid green next to it, because cool foliage beside a warm flower makes both look slightly dirty. Tropical foliage is what the island actually has, and it behaves differently from temperate greenery. The leaves are broader, glossier and more assertive, so they go in sparingly and low, where they read as a base rather than as a second flower competing with the peony. There is a better route here than leaves, though. Lisianthus, ranunculus, macrophylla hydrangea and orchids all come through in this market, and a small amount of any of them does the job foliage was being asked to do, without the coarse texture that comes with tropical leaves. Hydrangea is the most useful of the four. It fills at the same scale as a peony head, so it closes gaps without changing the bouquet into a mixed arrangement. Orchids are the one to use carefully. They hold far longer than a peony does, so a bouquet built with both ends up half alive and half finished by the weekend, and that reads worse than either flower would have done on its own. And some of the best bunches have nothing green in them at all. A round bunch of one variety, tied close and wrapped in plain paper, reads as deliberate, and with a flower whose heads are already the size of a fist there is very little left for foliage to add. #### Getting it to the address in that condition Stripped stems travel better, which matters more here than in a cool climate. Fewer leaves means less material sweating inside a wrap, and above 30 °C with high humidity we pack firm and add a cooling element, so a bouquet built lean arrives closer to the way it left. Seminyak, Canggu and Sanur take 90 to 150 minutes, and Uluwatu, Tabanan and remote villas run up to 3 to 4 hours. On the longer routes we cut back the greenery further still and let the flowers carry the bouquet on their own. Delivery runs 9 AM to 10 PM. Orders start from 650,000 IDR, with payment through QRIS, GoPay, OVO, DANA or cash to the courier. One request is worth making when the flowers go into an existing vase at a villa: ask for the lower leaves to be stripped further than usual. Anything left below the water line clouds it within a day in this air, and clouded water is the shortest route to a bouquet that ends on Thursday instead of Sunday.