Same-Day Flowers to Ashby, Even to the Streets Still Being Built

A new house in Ashby is usually a first home or a fresh start, and the person sending the flowers is often the one who cannot be there to help unpack: a parent interstate, a mate back east, a partner up on a roster.

These go to the home, and the home is the catch. On the newest releases the number is not on the house yet and the street can be a week old. A florist in or near Ashby will confirm the lot against the current address run and grab a mobile for whoever is home before the van leaves, which is the difference between flowers at the door and a driver circling a sand block.

Anna on what to send a brand-new house

The instinct is to send something big and showy to mark the occasion. In an Ashby summer that is a mistake. A tall soft arrangement on a hot new build with the air-con blasting is wilting by the third day. Send a bright mixed bunch built on chrysanthemums, or a few natives, instead. They hold their shape in the heat and through the air-con, and they look like a housewarming without turning into one by the weekend.

A sick relative, or a baby that arrived this morning. Either way the order is going to a ward you cannot walk into yourself, and the quiet worry is whether it reaches the right bed at all. A bunch of flowers will not fix a hospital stay, but it puts you in the room when you cannot be there. The nearest big hospital to Ashby is Joondalup Health Campus, about eight kilometres north, and it is where most of the new-baby and get-well orders from here are headed.

Flowers go to the patient services desk, not the bedside, and a staff member runs them up once the patient is on a ward. Siobhan and I used to do these runs ourselves in the early days, dropping at reception and leaving the ward staff to carry it through, so this part I know first-hand. From what our florists have seen, two things keep it smooth: order only after they have a ward and room number, and on a maternity delivery address it to the mum, not the baby. If the stay looks short, send to the house instead, because a discharged patient and a bunch still sitting at reception is a sad miss. A line like "thinking of you both, home soon" is plenty on the card. In a maternity room that card gets read more than the flowers get looked at, usually out loud, often at 2am.

Anna took thousands of these calls, and she has one firm rule.

No lilies to a ward. The pollen travels between rooms and not every patient can be near it. If someone really wants the lily look, pollen-free Asiatics give it to them with no pollen and no scent. Skip the gerberas too if you want them to last the stay, the hollow neck bends in a warm ward by about day three. A low box of carnations and chrysanthemums in its own water is the one that holds, and there is nothing for a tired new parent to trim or find a vase for. There is a surgical trial where patients in rooms with flowers needed fewer painkillers and had lower blood pressure. In a recovery ward they pull their weight.

A lot of Ashby birthdays land at a house with nobody home. The owners commute by car or they are away on a roster, so a daytime delivery to an empty place is the norm, not the exception. When the roster is the other way round and his birthday got missed on site, a welcome-home bunch for him does the same job.

That is fine as long as it is planned for. Leave a safe-place instruction when you order, somewhere shaded and out of the sun in summer, and the driver texts the recipient on drop so it is not sitting on a hot porch for hours. If you are the one away, you can run the whole thing online before the 2pm Perth cutoff and never miss the date.

More of these than people would guess come from a bloke on a mine site, ordering his wife or his mum a birthday bunch he is going to miss in person. I took that call hundreds of times off the phones, always a bit gruff, always wanting it to land on the actual day. For those I would steer toward something that does not need babysitting, a box or a sturdy mixed bunch, because nobody is home to top up a vase. The flowers have to carry the apology for the roster on their own.

Plenty of orders do not fit a clean occasion, and that is fine.

Ask for natives and let the florist pick what came in strong that morning. West Australian natives, banksia, wax, kangaroo paw, are grown within a couple of hundred kilometres of here and built for exactly this dry heat, and from August into October the whole state runs riot with wildflower, which is when they are at their best. Most of them last the better part of a fortnight, and no two bunches look the same, so it never feels off-the-shelf. Keep the waxflower off the kitchen bench, mind, the ethylene off a fruit bowl makes it shed in one go. The flip side is the banksia and the wax dry rather than die, so a fortnight on, the recipient has a slightly different bunch on the mantel than the one that arrived. When someone tells me they cannot decide, that is where I point them every time.