Wedding in Dubai

Wedding flowers in Dubai: what to look at when the box opens

A bridal bouquet gets inspected from a metre away, from every side, by people who have nothing else to do while they wait. No other arrangement in the catalogue is examined like that. Most of what separates a careful build from a rushed one is visible in the first half minute of holding it.

Turn the bouquet over and look at the handle. Stems laid in a proper spiral cross at one point and fan out below it in an even skirt, all cut to the same length with a clean angled blade. A hurried build gives itself away exactly there: stems meeting at three or four different heights, torn ends from blunt secateurs, and a thick wad of tape doing the job the spiral should be doing. None of that is visible once the ribbon is on, which is why the handle is worth a look while the box is still open.

The profile is the second thing. Seen from the side, a good dome has heads sitting at slightly different depths, so light gets between them and the shape carries weight in photographs.

Ribbon work is the third. A binding point wrapped tight and pinned from underneath survives a whole day of the bouquet being handed back and forth. Loose wrapping slides down the stems the first time somebody grips it low, usually in the middle of a photograph.

Good light and two minutes cover all of it.

Collection, and the drive across the city

Morning is the right time to take delivery, and light is the smallest of the reasons. Delivery across Dubai takes 2 to 4 hours, so a bouquet booked for the hour before the ceremony leaves nobody any room to fix a problem. Hotels in Downtown, Marina and on Palm Jumeirah route deliveries through service entrances, which adds time no map will show you. A wedding morning usually involves more than one address anyway, since the preparations, the ceremony and the dinner rarely sit in the same building. We plan the run backwards from the hour the bouquet has to be in somebody's hands.

Four lines at the order stage cover almost everything:

• The address of the preparations and the address of the ceremony, written separately.
• The exact hour the flowers are needed, not the hour the day begins.
• The name and number of whoever signs for the box.
• Anything you know about the building, because a hotel address can mean a lobby, a ballroom, a beach setup and a block of suites, and a courier holding buttonholes cannot walk all four looking for a coordinator.

Summer changes the packing. The desert climate reaches 40 °C, coastal humidity sits on top of it, and we send bridal work in insulated wrapping and keep it out of direct sun at every handover point.

Wedding flowers in Dubai are mostly built on Dutch roses at 60-90 cm. Ecuadorian roses up to 120 cm come in when a build needs length and are ordered ahead. Dutch peonies arrive outside their own season, which is worth knowing if the wedding month would rule them out anywhere else, and greenhouse tulips and chrysanthemums from the UAE hold a firm head through the walk between a cooled room and an open terrace.

Orders start from 250 AED, we work from 9 AM to 10 PM, and payment goes by Apple Pay or cash to the courier.

"Two minutes with the bouquet in daylight tells you more than a month of reference pictures. Almost nobody takes them, because collection always happens in a hurry."

— JFLOO florist

Book the whole day with one workroom. Batches of the same variety differ in tone between suppliers, and buttonholes ordered separately from the bouquet will quietly disagree with it in daylight photographs.