Next-Day Flowers to Burnie, Made This Side of the Strait

If you're arranging flowers for a Burnie funeral from across the strait, you're carrying two things at once: the loss, and that you can't be in the room for it. Flowers don't undo any of that. What they do is stand in the room when you can't, and the card tends to get kept in a drawer long after the flowers are gone.

There are two ways it goes. Before the service, flowers for the funeral go to the funeral home, and in Burnie that's usually Parkside out on East Cam Road, which runs its own crematorium with the lawn cemetery beside it. They need the name of the person who has died, the date and time of the service, and your name on the card, or it sits unclaimed at reception. After it, they go to the family home, and a week later is often kinder than the rush of the first few days. From what our florists have seen, the quiet period after everyone has gone home is when a delivery lands hardest. On the card, "thinking of your family" is enough.

Anna on sympathy for the north-west

Not every family wants a white sympathy arrangement, and Burnie is more mixed than people assume. If a caller told me the family was Hindu, I steered them off flowers for the service altogether, the garlands there are arranged by the family, and pointed them at a fruit basket to the home after the cremation, or warm tones, never white. If the family was Aboriginal, my first question was always whether they had checked the family wanted flowers at all, and if so, I went straight to native stems. And more and more in a town like Burnie there is no religion in it, just a send-off for someone who grew natives in the backyard or fished off the breakwater. For those, skip the formal wreath and send what looks like them. Natives hold, too: the leucadendron in a native arrangement can go three to six weeks in water, longer than almost anything else you could send across.

A hospital stay in Burnie usually means the North West Regional out at Cooee, and if you're sending hospital flowers from away, you're guessing at how they even reach a bedside.

From what our florists have seen, the way it works is flowers go to the main reception, a ward clerk logs them, and staff carry them through when they do their rounds, anywhere from half an hour to a few hours later. Put the patient's full name and the ward on the card, because without the ward it just waits at the desk. And day two beats day one, the first day after admission is all scans and shuffling between wards; if there's any chance they'll be discharged before it lands, ring the ward first. A get well arrangement in a box travels better than loose stems. On the card, keep it short, "thinking of you, rest up" does more than a filled page.

Skip anything with a heavy scent. No oriental lilies, the smell travels the whole ward and someone two beds down is recovering from surgery. The busy wards, intensive care and the cancer side, tend not to take flowers at all, so a general ward is the safe assumption. I always sent lisianthus for hospital runs, it looks like money, carries no perfume, and it will go a fortnight. In a box, not hand-tied, because the ward hasn't got a spare vase going.

New babies are the other one, and around here they tend to arrive next door at North West Private rather than the Regional. Address new baby flowers to the mum's name rather than the baby's, and keep the scent soft, a newborn doesn't need a room full of perfume. On the card, simple wins, "welcome to the world, little one" is plenty. I took enough new-baby calls to know that card gets read out loud more than once, usually around 2am, usually a bit teary.

Milestone birthdays are when the distance bites hardest, a 70th or an 80th for a parent who stayed in Burnie while you built a life on the mainland. The flowers get to the table you can't. They land before the family does and they're still there after everyone has gone home.

Most Burnie homes are freestanding with a doorstep you can get to, so there's none of the apartment-buzzer trouble of the cities. If they're out, a safe-place note covers it, a covered porch, behind the gate post. The Upper Burnie and Wivenhoe ends run to long or steep driveways, so a line in the order notes gets it to the door rather than the gate. If it's going to a workplace instead, the big employers like Elphinstone and the port take deliveries at reception rather than on the floor, so give us the building or the department.

A fair few of these go to Umina Park, the big aged care home on Mooreville Road in the middle of Burnie. From what our florists have seen, those go to reception and the staff take them round, so a box arrangement that carries its own water sits better than something tall that needs a vase and a clear bench. Keep the scent light and the stems familiar, roses, carnations, chrysanths, which is the kinder choice for anyone on the dementia side too.

For someone turning eighty I would point people at pastels and whites over a loud mixed arrangement nearly every time. A considered palette tends to say more than volume does. And flowers for Mum at this age earn their keep with carnations in the mix, eighteen days in a cool Burnie room, which at that price point is three weeks of a card on the sideboard reminding her someone made the effort.

Sometimes you don't know which occasion box to tick. You just want something that suits the person and gets there in good shape.

If you're stuck, tell us in the notes who it's for and let the florist build to the season. In a cold Burnie month that means the stems holding best that week, which is what you want chosen on the bench rather than off a screen. And you don't have to spend big for it to land; plenty of the orders I took from people anxious about the price did more in the seventy-dollar range than they expected, because a tight, well-made bunch says care louder than money does. Pastels travel well and suit almost anyone.