What the arrangement is saying.

When someone calls and tells us they need an arrangement for a recipient they have hurt, we do not ask why. We ask about the recipient. The flowers are not for the sender.

An apology bouquet is quieter than a celebration bouquet. There is no peony. There is no orchid. There is white, and ivory, and a single stem of something the recipient once mentioned in passing. The card message is short, and the writing is plain. Anything more and it becomes a performance.

A celebration bouquet, by contrast, can be loud. It can have peonies the size of a fist. It can have rouge. It can break the rules we usually keep. The recipient is somewhere already happy and the flowers are joining them, not arguing with them.

The hardest call we get is somewhere in between — someone who is gone, but the recipient is in a complicated grief. For those, we make something that has not made up its mind: white, with one warm thread running through it. We have made hundreds of those. They are the arrangements we are most careful with.