The People in the Towers

Most people meet Surfers Paradise on a Saturday night, or they meet it in November when the school leavers arrive, and that is the version they keep. Towers, noise, somebody else's holiday. A place you drive through on the way to somewhere quieter.

We are on Orchid Avenue, in the middle of it, and that is not the suburb we see.

Thousands of people live here

Not visit. Live. They are in the towers you can see from the beach, and they are doing what everybody everywhere does. They have birthdays. They get married. They have babies. They lose people. They need to say sorry, and they need to say thank you, and they need to say it today.

For years, almost every flower that arrived at one of those doors had been driven in from another suburb and driven straight back out again.

That is a strange thing about a place this dense. You can live twenty floors up in the busiest square kilometre on the coast and still not have a florist you can walk to. The convenience of this suburb is nearly all pointed at the person visiting it. Very little of it is pointed at the person who lives here.

A shop you can walk into is a different thing from a van that visits

It is the difference between choosing flowers and ordering them. You can see what came in that morning. You can change your mind at the counter, hold two things up against each other, say "that one, but taller". You can ask what is good this week and get an honest answer, because the person answering is standing in front of it.

That is the whole reason for having a shopfront rather than a website and a fridge. Everything we make is made here, by hand, on the day it is sent, from whatever the season is giving that week. Some weeks that is peonies. Some weeks it is not, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with flowers that were picked a fortnight ago somewhere else. What is best on the bench goes into This Week's Blooms, and it changes when the flowers change.

What the towers taught us

A few things we did not know before we opened here.

• The rooms are smaller and the light is enormous. An apartment twenty floors up gets sun the whole way across the day. Something tall and architectural reads beautifully against that much glass. A wide low arrangement disappears into it.
• Almost nobody has a vase. Or they have one, in a box, from a wedding. A boxed arrangement arrives in its own vessel with the water already sorted, which matters more than it sounds when the recipient might be at work.
• Concierges are the quiet heroes of this suburb. A great many of these buildings run on somebody at a front desk who knows everyone by name and takes in the parcels. If you are sending to a tower, that is the person to name on the order.
• A plant is a different gift here. In a rented apartment with no garden, something living is measured in months rather than days, and it is often the more generous thing to send.

The people sending are often not here at all

A daughter in Auckland. A son in London who has done the time zones wrong and needs it to arrive before dinner. A friend who moved to Melbourne and still knows which building has the difficult lift.

This is a suburb people move away from and keep loving, and a great many of our arrangements are chosen by someone who will never see them, for someone who lives ten minutes from the shop. If that is you, there is a page about sending from overseas, and you are very welcome to ask us how it turned out.

Somebody else noticed

Urban List have just published their round-up of the best florists on the Gold Coast, and they opened it with us. What they wrote was this.

If you thought Surfers Paradise was all high-rises and schoolies, allow Flowers Of Surfers Paradise to change your mind.

We could not have put it better, and it means more coming from somebody who does not work here.

A neighbourhood with a beach at the end of it

Surfers Paradise is not a stopover for the people who live in it. It holds the same birthdays and funerals and apologies as anywhere else, at a slightly higher altitude, and it is worth having somebody here who can put flowers in your hands on the day you need them.

We opened because somebody needed to be here. Come and see us at Shop 38, The Mark, on Orchid Avenue, or ring 0402 522 505. We love to help.