‘Thinking of you’ beats ‘happy birthday’: what a year of flower cards reveals about how Australians really say the hard things

What Australians really write on a flower card

There is a small pause that happens at the online checkout: the flowers are chosen, the address is in, and then a blank box appears, waiting for a message. It is the one part of a gift no one can write for you. New analysis from Australian florist Fig & Bloom shows that, given that blank space, almost everyone reaches for words anyway.

Fig & Bloom read a full year of card messages sent with its flowers, aggregated and stripped of names, to June 2026. The result is an unusually candid look at how Australians say the things they find hardest to say.

The headline findings:

• We almost always say something. Nine in ten orders (93%) carried a written message; only about one in fourteen left the card blank. The average message ran to about 29 words, and the longest this year topped 400.
• The line we reach for most is not “happy birthday.” The single most-written phrase of the year was “thinking of you,” appearing on more than one in seven cards. “Happy birthday” and “love you” ran almost level behind it.
• Celebration and comfort, back to back. Birthdays were the most common occasion (26% of messages), but sympathy and support together were close behind. For a country supposedly awkward about grief, a striking amount of what we send carries it.
• Love beats sorry, two to one. Nearly one in five messages said love in some form; about one in ten was an apology.
• Still stubbornly handwritten. A third of messages ended in a row of kisses, but only about 6% used an emoji, almost always a heart.

What the year keeps showing is that the flowers are the easy part. The hard, good part is the line underneath, the one only the sender can write, and it is the part the recipient keeps long after the flowers are gone.

The full data story, including the most-used words and a full occasion breakdown, is available at figandbloom.com. Fig & Bloom can provide the underlying data, imagery, and interviews on request.