Same Day Flower Delivery to Ashbury, Saturdays Too

It’s her birthday, she’s in Ashbury, and you’re not. Our birthday flowers for Mum go straight to the house, and the milestone birthdays have their own range, like the 80th birthday flowers.

Type the card in Italian or Greek if that’s what she reads. One customer wrote hers in German and her mum got it handwritten, word for word. Want chrysanthemums kept out? Say so in the notes.

If it’s lilies, pinch the orange anthers off as each one opens. Once that pollen dries it bonds to a tablecloth and it doesn’t come out.

Mum or Dad is in care now, and the Sunday visit has become a room number. For thinking of you flowers to Bupa Ashbury on Hardy Street, put their full name and room in the notes. A card can be short: “Thinking of you, Mum. See you Sunday.”

I learnt that on Kingscliff Street in 2007, carrying an eightieth birthday bunch to Room 4 at Kingscliff Gardens. There were two Room 4s, one in the hostel and one in the nursing home. I found the wrong one first. She was delighted. She was not turning eighty. The name on the card is what got the bunch to the right woman in the end.

Anna’s pick for a care room

Those rooms are kept warm and the air-conditioning dries the air, so soft petals curl at the edges first. Carnations and roses handle that air. Go low and compact, already in its own vase, because the bedside table is tiny and nobody in that room is hunting for one.

Someone in Ashbury has died and the service is in a church you may never have stood in. First decide whether the flowers go to the church or to the family home afterwards.

For a Requiem Mass at St Francis Xavier’s on Leopold Street, or a Greek Orthodox service at St Stephanos in Hurlstone Park, order our funeral flowers the day before the service, with the church and the time in the notes. Greek families hold a memorial on the fortieth day as well, and flowers go to that too. Flowers do very little against a death, and in a parish like this one they are still expected. “With deepest sympathy to the family” is enough for the card.

Anna’s call: white, for both. Lilies and roses for the Mass, a white wreath for the Orthodox church, and this is the one place chrysanthemums belong.

Plenty of orders don’t fit a heading: a thank-you to a neighbour, a get-well, a “just because she’s eighty-six”. If she’s a lily person, start with our lilies. If you’re not sure, Anna has a pick.

The Rose, Gerbera & Lilies Bunch. In a Sydney lounge room the roses and gerberas give you about a week, the lily buds keep opening after that, and nothing in it carries a second meaning in an Italian or Greek house. Change the water every second day. Bacteria in the vase water are what bend a gerbera at the neck.