It's a total intoxication of the senses to step through the old white-trimmed French doors of the boutique-style Morpeth Flower Gallery.
The scent within holds the power of instant attraction, and the sight is one to behold.
Around the shop's rustic stone walls, blooms of all variety splay out, from the subtlety of native pink mulla mulla desert blossoms to brilliant hued anemones.
Since opening her small shop at the top of the historic town's main street five years ago, Suzanne Eyre's been delighted by people stopping by "just to stand in the space because it's just beautiful".
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Eyre started in floristry as an 18-year-old living in Sydney's Newport. She was working as a secretary when she noticed an ad for an "experienced florist" at a shop she much admired.
"I walked in there and said 'I don't have any experience but I want to work here' and they took me on right then and there," Eyre recounts. "I was trained on the job with some beautiful florists."
Those florists came from the tutelage of the eminent A-list event decorator, Susan Avery of Woollahra, in Sydney's eastern suburbs. And Avery's influence continues to shape Eyre's concept of colour arrangement.
She talks as she builds a bouquet, setting iridescent blue delphinium against flat disc-like leaves of grey-green gum. The petals seem to shimmer more as she places them in their new setting.
Eyre, who has come back to floristry after working as a natural therapist, says opening the shop "transported me into a completely different world".
"This is a much nicer way to be engaged with people I think, because it's from moment to moment, it's not like a formal thing," she says.
"They're sharing what they're buying the flowers for, you need to be able to relate to them."
Her return to floristry was at a school fete stall, which gained Eyre an invitation to create arrangements for an upmarket Hunter Valley venue. That led her to set up a street cart outside the local bottle shop to sell any stems she had to spare.
Then one day it turned very windy, and Eyre wished she had a place to call her own. That coincided serendipitously with a friend's decision to close their art gallery.
Eyre seized the moment and signed up for the space, decking it out with an antique dressing table she brought from home, and her children's old wooden toy boxes.
Now she's florist to Pokolbin's acclaimed Muse restaurant, and is booked for weddings up to two years' in advance, doing more than 40 a year.
"It's really beautiful when you're creating a bridal bouquet to hold that bride's intention, who she is," Eyre says.
Though, some brides now opt for floristry that's more installation art, without a bouquet in sight and maybe no white blooms either.
Eyre herself often takes less traditional routes to expressing emotional intentions.
Sometimes she puts red in sympathy bouquets, which are traditionally soft pastel, because "a red flower is a much better flower for a loss".
And on Valentine's Day, "I don't do red roses". Pretty mixed bouquets and natives say more, according to Eyre. Though, the messages that men want written on the cards are also treasures. Some are so embarrassed that they text their message to Eyre, "so they don't have to say it".
"That's glorious, all the love," Eyre says.
But Mother's Day, she says, eclipses all as the year's biggest flower-giving occasion and also "the loveliest". Though she is very fond of making first-date bouquets "especially when it's a young boy, that's really sweet".
Then there's the rocky end of relationships, when men can get quite teary over floral choices. "The possibilities are endless, you don't know who's going to come in the door," Eyre says.
It was a seemingly not unusual order for a wedding anniversary that turned into the most poignant experience Eyre's had.
"The lady cried at the door," she says. Her husband had Alzheimer's and she couldn't believe he had remembered.
"I cried with her. Nothing else matters in the world in those moments, that's what life's about really.
"It's like 'who's going to walk in next', it's up and down and all over the place. It's beautiful to be moved like that."
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