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Bombastic spray roses: counting the stems before you order
One stem is not one flower. It carries a cluster of three to five buds, and every one of them opens into a packed cream head rather than a small filler bloom, so the figure you give at the counter is a count of stems while the count of flowers that arrives is several times larger.
Most people ask for far too many.
Working out the size
Picture an armful of two dozen single-headed roses. Nine or ten Bombastic stems put a comparable quantity of colour into the same wrap, weigh much less in the hand, and make a wider, lower silhouette, because the buds sit at several heights instead of standing in one flat dome.
Order the same stem count you would use for single-headed roses and you get an object nobody can carry comfortably and no ordinary vase at home will hold.
Density is the second half of the sum. The head of this variety is tightly packed and keeps the shape of a ball. It fills its own volume from the first day and needs no neighbours crowded in around it to hide the gaps. Looser spray sorts flatten out by midweek and you compensate for that with extra stems. Here you rarely have to.
Five stems already read as a proper gift rather than an apology, which is unusual for a small flower.
How the bunch goes together
The stems are thin, flexible and easy to lay in a spiral, and just as easy to bind too tightly. A tie pulled hard crushes the hollow part of the stem, water stops moving through it, and the central head of the cluster goes soft while the side buds are still closed.
Good work on this variety is mostly subtraction. Each stem carries shoots that will never set, along with buds that have already gone over, and those come off in the workroom rather than in the recipient's kitchen. Nobody counts them at handover, though the difference is obvious by the third day, when nothing brown has appeared between the heads.
Three things are worth a look when the bunch is handed over:
- whether the blind side shoots have been taken out of each cluster
- whether the cut ends are clean and slanted rather than crushed flat
- whether the binding point sits low enough for the clusters to spread above it
Foliage matters less than usual. Packed cream heads sitting close together already give the eye plenty to read, and heavy greenery pushed between them turns the surface into a hedge.
Cream, and what sits next to it
The colour runs from chalk white through to a warm cream in the same batch, sometimes on the same stem, and that variation is what keeps a white bunch from looking synthetic.
Against pure white packaging the flowers lose their edges. Kraft paper, unbleached linen, anything with a bit of grey or sand in it gives the heads a boundary and lets the layering of the petals show.
Ordering ahead
Tight heads travel better than open ones, which is why the variety is usually dispatched closed and finishes opening indoors. Allow a couple of days in a warm room if the bunch has to be at full width on a particular evening. Keep it somewhere cool if it arrived early and needs holding back.
A courier in Melbourne will get a closed bunch of Bombastic spray roses to the door in the condition it left the workroom, and the rest of the work happens on the recipient's table over the following week.
