800Flowers in a Box

My sister and Rebecca sent my mom some flowers for her birthday (today). Since they went on a trip yesterday, and I never go through the front door, the flowers were sitting in a box outside since yesterday. Good thing they called, otherwise it will probably sit there for a week.


The box was delivered by UPS (I think). The flower and vase were packed inside.


Since the box was on our front doorstep for a day (or two), I was afraid that the flowers inside would be dead. Not to fear... since each stem was packed with a little plastic thingy filled with water.


Just because they were still alive doesn't mean they were in good shape. Orchids are pretty delicate and a lot of flowers/buds were detached from the stem through shipping. They're supposed to (I think) look like the stem on the left but some were almost bare twigs.


I wasn't sure what it was supposed to look like so I laid out all the "material" first. There seemed to be a lot of stems for the small vase. I also didn't know what to do with the four large green leaves.


After some debate (with myself), I decided to make an unidirectional arrangement, i.e. with a "front" and a "back" view. I put the green leaves on one side of the vase and started inserting the orchid stems at random. The ones with missing flowers were good for the back but it got crowded in the front.


I think there were supposed to be 30 stems but I ran out of room. I put the remaining 4 into another vase (actually a water bottle).


In the process of arranging the flowers, I managed to knock off some more of the flowers... but you couldn't tell from the arrangement since it's so dense. This reminds me of graduation leis.


I moved the main arrangement into the living room. Hopefully it will last until my mom gets back from their trip.

I went online to the 800Flowers site to see what this was supposed to look like and found this:



I'm not sure how they got the arrangement to be more "open" instead of all jammed up. Maybe I was supposed to remove some of the flowers from the lower part of each stem. They also didn't ship me any "long" stems; every stem was about the same length (short) which further crowded the flowers. I don't think anyone could have duplicated the pictured arrangement from what was shipped. Oh well...

I'm actually a bit disappointed in 800Flowers for shipping flowers in a box. I guess it's cheaper to centralize operations but you leave the final arrangement to the lame skills of the consumer. I think I did an okay job but I could have easily screwed it up more and blame 800Flowers for the poor results. Having a fresh arrangement delivered by a local florist is much better and didn't used to cost any more.