Flowers Delivered to Alfred Cove, in Time for the Service

Organising flowers for a funeral when you are not in the city is mostly a logistics problem wearing a grief problem's clothes. Flowers will not fix any of it, and you already know that. What they do is stand at the back of the church and say the thing you cannot be there to say yourself.

Sort it first by where it is going. A personal condolence goes to the family's home. Tributes for the service go to the funeral director with the Mass time confirmed first, and for the Catholic services around here that is the parish over at Palmyra. From what our florists have seen, timing is the part that bites: a casket spray that turns up after the service has started cannot be undone, so the service time gets locked in before the order moves at all.

White lilies for a Catholic service, every time. They carry the weight a church asks for, and an Italian family will usually order generously around them, white and soft-pink roses and a few daisies, the roses cut at the half-open stage so they keep coming out once the family has them home. Keep the chrysanthemums for the funeral itself, never as the gift that comes before or after it. If you want words for the card, plain beats poetry: thinking of you and your family says enough. The flowers fade inside a week anyway. It is the card the family keeps.

If someone you love is at the aged care home on Kitchener Road and you cannot visit as often as you would like, flowers are a way of putting yourself in the room when you cannot be in it. If they are living with dementia and may not register who the flowers came from, send them anyway; they might mean more to you than to them, and that is alright. You do not need a birthday or an anniversary, a just-because arrangement is reason enough.

In our experience deliveries there go to reception, and the staff carry them through to the resident's room, so the full name and the wing, if you know it, matter more than anything fancy on the card. For the memory-support side of the home, smaller and simpler travels better than a big centrepiece. Anna spent years steering callers through exactly this, and she has a rule for it.

In a memory-support room you want stems that are safe if someone touches them or tastes them, so I keep away from anything bulb-grown and lean on roses, daisies, lavender, the familiar things tied to a life rather than a magazine cover. Keep the fragrance low in a shared room. And send it in a box: it sits stable on a side table, holds its own water, and saves the staff from hunting for a vase. The first thing she sees from the doorway is the colour, so choose something warm enough to read across the room.

Sending flowers to a ward when you cannot be at the bedside yourself is its own particular kind of helpless. I have done the other end of that run, years ago in our shop days: a bunch that had to be at hospital reception in five minutes, a baby screaming in the back of the car, nowhere to park, the heat coming off the bitumen. So I know exactly what the handover looks like from the inside.

Alfred Cove's hospitals are a short drive south, St John of God Murdoch for a new arrival and Fiona Stanley for most else. From what our florists have seen, hospital flowers go to the main reception rather than the bedside, and staff carry them through once the patient is settled on a ward, so order after they are admitted, not while they are still in emergency, and give the full name and the ward. For a new baby, address it to the mother. She did the work, and she is the one who will read your card out loud at 2am to a partner running on no sleep, so keep the card plain. "Congratulations, and sleep when you can" beats anything clever. If it is a get-well delivery you are after, the same rules hold.

Anna on hospital flowers

Skip the lilies for a hospital ward. The pollen is a problem in a closed room, it carries between beds, and plenty of wards would rather it stayed out even when the patient does not mind. Send something low-scent and structured, lisianthus and gerberas hold up well, and have the gerberas wired so the heads do not flop in the heat of the building. A box or a vase, never a wrap, because nobody on a maternity ward has a spare vase and a pair of scissors.

Plenty of orders to Alfred Cove are not a funeral, a hospital or the aged care home. A retirement, an anniversary, a christening or a Confirmation for one of the Catholic families here, a milestone birthday for someone who has lived in the same house for forty years, an apology that needs to land well.

A bloke rang from Adelaide once wanting a box of chrysanthemums sent to his wife's parents in Perth for their anniversary, because he had read somewhere they last well. They do. But the parents were Italian, and chrysanthemums to an Italian household read as grave flowers, so I talked him onto roses and a few seasonal stems instead, and he was glad I said something. When you are not sure, that is the safe ground: roses, or a mixed arrangement built from whatever came in strongest that morning. Tell us the relationship and the mood you are after and let the florist's choice do the rest.