Recommend a flower source?

I’ve used Proflowers several times. The prices are great, especially for roses, and the recipients are always blown away by the beautiful quality.

I’m a Proflowers customer as well. There was an advertising campaign a while back that made fun of poor-quality boxed flowers, but my experience is that they arrived on time, were fresh, of great quality and lasted at least 1 week in the vase.

The few times I have done this I have found local florists in the the city or town of the person I am having them delivered to and called those people directly. When you order from the big companies all they do is outsource it to a local florist and you have no say in who that is. You can do all the research on the internet. A lot of independent florists have websites where you can get a sense of the quality and they are sometimes cheaper because you are cutting out the middle man who just takes your order and then arranges for a local florist, one of their affiliates, to put it together and do the delivery.

Edit: Also, by doing this, something kind of amazing happened. I wanted to send a peace lilly to my aunt in Cleveland when my uncle, my mother’s brother, died. In researching the local florists I discovered that a couple was living in and running a florist shop in my grandparents old house, the house that my mom and her sister and brothers grew up in. My grandparents lived in that house for about 50 years. It was just so nice to send flowers from that house. It was like the whole family was there, in spirit, after Jim’s death.

I also recommend ProFlowers. I received a gorgeous phalenopsis that stayed in bloom for almost 6 months from them.

Hmmm…Proflowers is the very outfit that my son’s disappointing orders came from. They looked like they had been on the road a long time, were very dry, and never opened up properly. This happened twice. The first time, of course I praised his thoughtfulness, because who wants to tell someone they sent bad flowers? The second time I had to tell him they weren’t up to snuff because I couldn’t let him keep spending his money on something that wasn’t worth it, when he couldn’t judge the quality for himself.

I have done exactly what you did, @lillycoyote. I sent flowers to my mother often during her last years, and I agree that that’s the best way. But occasions do come along that don’t call for the same amount of fussing that I put into special orders for my flower-doting mother. It would be nice to have a regular source I can rely on for things of that sort.