Our co-founder on the geography hidden inside a finished bouquet: why we mapped all 55 of our live recipes, what the first calculations showed us, and what a distance can and cannot say.
There is a moment at the bench when a bouquet stops being ingredients and becomes one thing. The stems settle into each other, the paper goes on, the sticker holds it closed, and from then on everyone who meets it will read it as a single object. One design. One gift. One place.
Our paperwork tells a different story. Where I see one bouquet, the provenance records see a list: so many stems of this flower from this origin, so many of that one from somewhere else entirely. A design we wrap in Fairfield in under a minute can hold foliage cut in Victoria that week and roses that began their journey on the other side of the equator. The wrapping is the last thing that happens to a bouquet, and it is very good at hiding everything that happened before it.
This winter we decided to stop letting it hide. We calculated, for every live recipe we make, an estimate of how far the stems in that bouquet are from the studio making it. We call it the Flower Journey, and it is on the product page now.
This is the story of that number: why we built it, what the first full dataset showed us, and, just as important, what it cannot tell you.
Where the number lives
This is not a report we published once and filed away. The Flower Journey sits on the product page itself, in a band below the bouquet, on every design that carries it.
Until we know where the flowers are going it waits, because the answer depends on which of our three studios will make yours. Add a delivery address and it resolves.
The flower journey
Estimated stem-count-weighted average journey.
From known origin to our Melbourne studio; recipient delivery is excluded.
We weight every flower and foliage stem by the quantity in this design, then measure its straight-line distance from a consistent origin proxy to the Fig & Bloom studio preparing it.
Australian origins use their state capital. Country-only origins use a national flower-export hub. The figure excludes delivery to the recipient. It is not the actual freight route, a farm-distance claim, a carbon footprint or a sustainability score. Seasonal substitutions may change it.
Twenty designs carry it today, forty-five variants between them. Open the Osaka bouquet, put in a Melbourne address, and the band reads about 8,300 kilometres per stem. Put in a Brisbane one and the same design reads about 8,700. The panel underneath opens to the short version of the method, and the link at its foot goes to the full working: every origin point, every distance, every recipe behind it.
Most people will scroll straight past, and that is fine. What matters is that it is on the page before you buy, rather than in a report afterwards that no shopper would ever go looking for.
The label that says almost nothing
Flower provenance usually reaches shoppers as a single word. Local. Imported. Australian-grown. I understand why: labels have to be short. But most provenance language in this industry is a mood, not a measurement, and a mixed bouquet makes it nearly meaningless. If 17 of a bouquet’s stems were grown in the state where it was made and 10 crossed the Pacific to get there, which word does the label deserve?
We wanted something more honest than a vibe and less presumptuous than a verdict. A number we could calculate the same way every time, publish the method behind, and defend line by line. Not because distance is the whole story of a flower. It isn’t. But it is one concrete, knowable part of a story shoppers are almost never shown, and you cannot ask good questions about a supply chain you cannot see.
So Daniel, my co-founder, spent the last weeks of July doing something slightly obsessive to our recipe database.
What the number actually is
The Flower Journey is the estimated average distance per stem, from growing origin to the Fig & Bloom studio preparing the bouquet, weighted by how many stems come from each origin.
In practice, five things happen. Every botanical stem in a recipe is matched to its documented or approved working origin. Where our records name only a state or a country, we use one consistent representative point standing in for it. We measure the straight-line distance from that point to the studio making the bouquet, weight each origin’s distance by its stem count, then divide by the total stems in the recipe.
For the readers who want the formula: average stem journey = sum of (quantity × origin-to-studio distance) ÷ total stem units. Everyone else may keep scrolling with a clear conscience.
Two honesty notes before any numbers. First, these are straight-line surface distances, the minimum geographic separation between two points. No flower travels that way, and we are not claiming to know actual routes, only geography. Second, the estimate resolves to whichever of our studios makes your bouquet: Fairfield in Melbourne, Camperdown in Sydney or Bowen Hills in Brisbane. Same recipe, different bench, different number.
The first full calculation is a July 2026 snapshot covering all 55 of our live recipes, across 20 participating products and their 45 variants. Beneath it sits a provenance audit of 114 flower and foliage lines we buy or have bought, 32 of which appear in the current recipe set, along with 11 approved representative origin points, our three studios, and the 33 origin-to-studio distances between them. Every recipe mapped cleanly: zero unresolved origins, zero unmapped recipes, zero incomplete variants.
Three bouquets, three studios
Take three designs from the same shelf. Broome comes out at about 350 kilometres per stem when it is made in Melbourne, about 1,000 from Sydney and about 1,650 from Brisbane. Marseille sits at about 5,200 from Melbourne, about 5,500 from Sydney and about 6,000 from Brisbane. Osaka reaches about 8,300, 8,400 and 8,700. Those are the Signature size in each case. Size changes the recipe and the recipe changes the number, so the same design in a smaller or larger size reads differently on the page.
It would be easy to read that as a leaderboard. Please don’t. Those three lines demonstrate two properties of the metric, not a ranking of virtue: what’s in the recipe moves the number by thousands of kilometres, and so, more quietly, does the studio that makes it.
“I expected a mixed picture,” Daniel says. “What I didn’t expect was how much the studio changes the number: the same Broome recipe is about 350 kilometres from our Fairfield bench and about 1,650 kilometres from Bowen Hills.”
Across everything we mapped, the middle of the range sits further out than most people guess. The mean estimated journey is about 5,500 kilometres per stem for bouquets made in Melbourne, about 5,700 for Sydney and about 6,100 for Brisbane, with medians of about 6,300, 6,600 and 6,400. One scope note, because averages invite misreading: these are descriptive statistics across those 45 mapped variants, each counted once. They are not weighted by sales, and they are not the average customer order. Within that range, the shortest journey in the snapshot is Broome Gesture made in Melbourne, at about 350 kilometres per stem, and the longest is shared by Osaka Signature and its matching vase variants made in Brisbane, at about 8,700.
Marseille, or why you cannot just count stems
One example rearranged my own intuition. Marseille’s recipe holds 27 botanical stems: 17 assigned to Victoria and 10 to Ecuador. Standing at the bench, you would call that a mostly local bouquet, and by stem count you would be right.
The weighted journey disagrees. From our Melbourne studio, the Victorian representative point sits about six kilometres from Fairfield, so those 17 stems contribute almost nothing. The 10 Ecuadorian stems, measured from the flower-export hub at Quito, do 99.9 per cent of the distance. Make the same recipe in Sydney and Ecuador’s share is about 92 per cent; in Brisbane, about 85. Fewer than half the stems carry nearly all of the kilometres.
That is the whole argument for weighting. A bouquet that is two-thirds Victorian by stem count can still hold a five-thousand-kilometre average, and simply counting local stems would have hidden it. The number is doing what a label cannot: holding two truths about one bouquet at the same time.
The bouquet in the worked example.
Marseille, roses at its heart, from $145. Shop the Marseille →
Honest points on a map
About those representative points, because this is exactly where an estimate could quietly overclaim, and we have tried hard not to let ours. When a provenance record names only a state, we measure from the state capital: Melbourne for Victoria, Brisbane for Queensland. When it names only a country, we measure from a documented flower-export hub: Quito for Ecuador, Nairobi for Kenya, Auckland for New Zealand, Aalsmeer for the Netherlands. These are calculation proxies chosen so the maths is consistent and reproducible. They are not farm addresses, and a line from Quito to Fairfield is not a claim about which aircraft, ship or highway a rose actually used.
The number is a snapshot, not a birth certificate. This dataset reflects July 2026, and provenance moves with the seasons. Our Sarah Bernhardt peonies resolve to the Netherlands from January to September, to New Zealand in October, and to Victoria for November and December, so the same bouquet can carry a different journey in a different month. If you like following the year that way, our Australian flower calendar walks through what’s at its best, month by month.
Ask Daniel what a florist notices that a shopper rarely gets to see, and he doesn’t hesitate: “Substitutions. Provenance isn’t fixed: a peony that’s Dutch in July is Victorian in November. We work with that seasonality every week, and the calculation had to respect it rather than flatten it.”
What the number cannot tell you
Now the section I most wanted to write, because it would have been very easy to dress this number up as more than it is.
The Flower Journey is not a carbon footprint. It is not an emissions estimate, a sustainability score or an environmental report card. It does not know whether a stem flew or sailed, what route it took, how it was consolidated along the way, what refrigeration it needed, how the greenhouse that raised it was heated, what was wasted before it reached us, or how far the courier drives from our studio to your recipient’s door. It measures one thing: the estimated geographic separation between stated growing origins and the bench where a bouquet is made.
A shorter journey is not a virtue, and a longer one is not a sin.
So no, a shorter estimated journey does not automatically mean a smaller environmental impact. A field-grown flower that crossed an ocean and a heated-greenhouse stem raised nearby do not fit on the one ruler, and we would rather say that plainly than sell you a warm feeling the data cannot support. Distance is a fact about geography, not a judgement about worth. We’re publishing it because facts about geography are still worth having, and because the alternative, saying nothing, was starting to feel like a choice.
How to read it
So what should you do with the number when you’re choosing between two bouquets?
“If the journey matters to you, look at it alongside what the bouquet is for and what’s in season, and read the methodology,” Daniel says. “It’s one input for an intentional choice, not a score to chase.”
That is honestly how I hope it gets used. The bouquet you send will still arrive as one object, one gesture, read in a single glance at the door. Nothing about that moment changes. What changes is that, for the first time, you can see a little of the geography folded inside it before you choose.
Add your delivery details on any participating bouquet to see its estimated Flower Journey, the Osaka is a good place to start, or read how we calculate the Flower Journey in full. And if you like your flowers with a side of data, The Geography of Gifting maps a year of who Australia sends flowers to, and why.
