Somebody Pays for the Drive

Somewhere before dawn on your wedding day, a van you will never see is being loaded outside a shop you have never been to. Buckets wedged into the footwell. Wire, foam and secateurs in a milk crate. A trestle table on top, because nobody drives that far on the assumption that one will be waiting.

You booked a vineyard for what the light does to the rows at six in the evening. That is a good reason to book a vineyard, and I would book one too. The flowers in that photograph were made a long way from those rows, and somebody was paid to bring them out. It is real work, it is on your invoice, and it is almost never a line you can point at.

Where your flowers actually live

In most of this country a couple can hire a florist who lives in the region the wedding is in. She knows the road, she has been to the venue, and getting there is not a job in itself.

Then there are the few regions where nobody does. Florists work there. None of them lives there. Every arrangement that turns up on the day was made somewhere else and driven in, and nothing you sign at the venue will tell you so.

A florist has to earn a living in the fifty weeks that are not your wedding, and she earns it from people who can walk in the door and order flowers for a birthday, a funeral, a hospital room. Nobody opens a shop where the customers are grapes.

So the florists publish where they are. The venues publish what they cost. The drive is in neither document, and so nobody has to tell you about it.

Who pays for the drive

You do, and you will almost never see it happen. Hours on the road with buckets of water sliding about in the back. A morning building things on grass. Then the same road home after the pack down, in the dark, with the empty vases. As a delivery charge it looks steep. As fuel, a vehicle and somebody's whole Saturday, it looks like what it is.

The florist is right to charge for that, and right not to print a price. Travel gets quoted job by job: how far, what date, how much has to be carried, whether anybody has to sleep near the venue. One flat rate would be wrong for nearly every job you put it against. So it goes into the quote with everything else, and the quote arrives without seams.

A quote without seams is where it costs you. By the time the drive reaches you it is sitting underneath a venue minimum, and a venue minimum is a far bigger number. It is how a room stops itself being taken for a party of forty. But beside it the travel looks like a rounding error, and a rounding error is the one thing nobody queries.

A flower calendar written somewhere else

The drive is the obvious cost. The one nobody mentions is the flower calendar, and it was written for somewhere else.

Some florists publish a seasonal guide, and the good ones are careful: what is out in each season, sometimes down to the half of the month. They give it away free and it is genuinely useful. It is also written for the place the florist stands in, because what is out depends on the weather where she is, and she has never claimed otherwise.

Nobody has written that guide for a region with no florist living in it. So the question is not what is in season. It is what is in season where you are getting married, which is not the same place as where your flowers are being made. Ask what month your flowers actually grow in, then ask which place the answer is describing.

When the florist is already there

In some wine regions the florist is already there: a shop you can walk into between cellar doors, or somebody buying from a grower a few paddocks away and working to when he picks rather than to when a truck arrives.

What that buys is not fewer kilometres and it is not a cheaper quote. It is a florist for whom your venue is not a trip. She has been there in February and in July. She knows which gate the van fits through and what the afternoon wind does on that particular lawn. When something goes wrong at four o'clock she is down the road rather than out on a highway.

Closeness like that is rare, and where you find it, it is a person or two rather than an industry. On paper, the difference between a region where no florist lives and one where one or two do looks small. On the morning it is the whole thing.

Before the deposit

The florist who itemises her travel and the florist who folds it into a total are not the honest one and the dodgy one. They are quoting you the same work. The difference is how early you get to ask about it.

Where does the van start, and what time does it leave? Most of the other answers live inside that one: what the travel costs, who is driving, whether anybody comes back at the end of the night for the vases. Put it in the first message, while the drive is still a number of its own and not a rounding error at the foot of a quote you have already fallen for.

The vineyard is local. The cellar door is local. The view is extremely local. The flowers are not, and the van carrying them was loaded in the dark by somebody who was already at work while you were asleep.