Same Day Flowers to Aubin Grove, Before the Porch Gets Hot

A new baby means the room, wherever it is, is already full of people and noise and not a lot of sleep. The florists who cover Aubin Grove run up to the maternity wards at Fiona Stanley and St John of God at Murdoch most weeks, so the delivery goes to the main reception and a ward clerk walks it through to the bed.

Address it to the mother, not the baby, with her ward, and order the day of or check she is still in, because maternity stays are short and a discharged mum means the same parcel goes to the house. One thing worth knowing if the baby came early: a special care nursery does not take flowers at all, so those wait for a general room or go home. A boxed new baby arrangement covers every version of this without you having to guess which.

Anna, on what a maternity ward can actually take

Leave the lilies off, or use the pollen-free Asiatic ones. Pollen near newborns is the whole reason. Keep it low and gentle: gerberas for the colour on day one, spray roses opening in behind them through the week, a few carnations and some lisianthus, all in a box that carries its own water so nobody has to find a vase. And the card the mum reads at two in the morning matters more than the stem count. "Welcome to the world, little one" is plenty.

A birthday means you are missing the table, the cake, the noise of the room, by a couple of thousand kilometres, and the flowers go in your place. Here that splits two ways: the little kids and the mums running their mornings, and the grandparents, some of them in aged care now. Either way, the catch is the same one, the empty house.

On a weekday afternoon a lot of these streets sit quiet, both parents at work or up north on a roster, garage door down, nobody to take a bunch off the porch. So leave an authority to leave with a shaded spot named, the porch out of the sun rather than the west-facing letterbox, and the driver will message the house on the way. If the birthday person works in town, sending it to their reception is the cleaner option.

Worth thinking about what sits on that porch if it has to wait. A hydrangea will be limp by mid-afternoon in a dry Perth heat, sometimes inside the hour, and a tulip blows wide open and is finished in a day or two. Chrysanthemums, carnations and the WA natives do not flinch, and they still look like something when the door finally opens at six. Come July the threat flips, a near-frost dawn on this sandplain instead of a hot afternoon, but the answer holds: the robust stems take it either way, and the morning run keeps them clear of the worst of both.

Flowers will not fill the empty chair, and you know that already. What they do is say you noticed it was empty, from however far away you happen to be. Two different gestures sit inside that. There is the quiet check-in on someone at Regents Garden on Lyon Road, a comfort order, often standing, often from a family interstate who cannot get over as often as they would like. And there are flowers for a funeral, when a service runs through Seasons at Cockburn Central and they go to the funeral director and the chapel date, not the home.

Sort which one you are sending first, because they are built differently. On the sympathy side, this is a churchgoing pocket of Perth, and for a Catholic service, white lilies and white roses to the church are the safe, expected choice. If the family is Hindu, though, flowers are not the custom at the service, so a fruit basket or an arrangement to the home after the cremation is the kinder call. When you are not sure of a family's customs, say so when you order and the florist will steer you right. For a card, "thinking of you, always" suits the aged-care side, and "with our deepest sympathy" never goes wrong for a funeral.

One thing from the aged-care side: keep it small, familiar and non-toxic, because a resident might touch it or taste it. Roses, daisies, simple seasonal, in a box that fits a bedside table next to the medicines and the photos. Skip the statement lilies and anything heavily scented in a shared room. And on those bedside tables the flowers go in a week, but the card stays for months, the families told me, kept long after the stems are gone. So write something worth keeping.

Plenty of orders do not sit neatly in baby, birthday or sympathy. A welcome to a new street, a thank you to the neighbour who watered the garden, a flower carpet for Onam laid out across the front step, a just because for someone having a flat week. None of it needs a category before you can send it.

Onam and Navratri are bigger here than people outside the suburb would guess. The callers marking either one wanted loose, petal-heavy flowers in marigold and chrysanthemum tones for the pookalam at the door, not a tied bunch in cellophane, and a generous amount of it. Tell the florist that is what it is for and they will build it accordingly.

When people could not pick at all, I steered them toward the WA natives more often than the roses. Kangaroo paw, banksia, a bit of leucadendron: they grew in this state, they shrug off a hot delivery, and the banksia and leucadendron dry to a second life on a shelf long after a rose would have gone in the bin. From September the wildflower season is on and they are at their best. For a suburb that runs warm, that is the safe money.