Flower Delivery to Auburn, Right for the Family and the Faith

The Auburn Order Where One Question Saved the Whole Gift

Anna, qualified florist | fifteen years on the bench, and the suburb where I asked the most questions on the phones

Most florists will tell you white is for sympathy and red is for love. In Auburn that gets you into trouble fast. This was the suburb where I asked more questions on the phones than anywhere else on my run, because what looks like a safe choice in one household is the wrong message in the one next door. A woman rang from Wollongong wanting chrysanthemums for a Chinese colleague's birthday. I stopped her. In Chinese custom the chrysanthemum is a funeral flower, white and yellow, so a birthday bunch of them reads as grief. I steered her to roses instead, and the order landed the way she meant it.

Rookwood runs along Auburn's eastern boundary, the biggest cemetery in the country, with its own Islamic, Chinese, Catholic and Orthodox sections, and each one wants something different. The one I was most careful with was a Muslim funeral. A lot of those families want no flowers at all, the burial happens inside about a day, and flowers never go to the mosque. So I would not guess. The line I used on every one of those calls was plain: has the family said whether flowers are welcome? If they had not, a modest white arrangement to the home after the burial was the safe call, never a spray to the service.

Red at a Chinese or Buddhist funeral was the one that frightened me most, because it reads as celebrating the death, and you cannot take it back once it is on the casket. So the rule I worked by in Auburn was the opposite of a script. Ask first, then match it: white and yellow chrysanthemums for a Chinese service, white lilies and a confirmed date for a Catholic or Maronite one. After a Hindu cremation a fruit basket to the home does more than a bouquet, and with a Muslim family the question always comes before the flowers. One question up front saved more orders than any clever bunch ever did.

The other thing Auburn taught me was heat. This is inland Sydney, four to six degrees hotter than the eastern beaches on a bad summer day, with none of the salt air that holds moisture in a petal. Half the suburb is flats, and an air-conditioning vent dries a soft stem out faster than the sun does, so I would never send a hydrangea into an Auburn flat in February. The heat or the draught finishes it before the day is out. What I steered people toward was chrysanthemums, carnations and natives, stems that shrug off the heat and the dry air. The gerberas and the natives barely travel here either, grown out at Horsley Park and Leppington and through the market on the boundary, so they reach the door with more life left in them than a rose that flew in overnight.

How a Flower Order Travels From the Market to an Auburn Door

There is no warehouse behind this. We started the network in 2009 the hard way, faxing orders to florists one at a time, on a deal we were always up front about: they put a few more stems in the bunch to cover our commission, and every order from their page was theirs. The fax machine is long gone, but the deal has not changed. Your Auburn flowers are made by a florist near the suburb, from stock bought that morning at the market up the road.

* What happens to your order once it reaches the Lily's Florist network.

After You Order

Once your order is in, it goes to a partner florist near Auburn as a paid order, and they build it that morning from what they bought at the market. The cutoff is 2pm on weekdays and 10am on a Saturday. You do not pick the exact stems; the florist does, to the season and to whatever is freshest that day.

On anything heading to a service at Rookwood, the team rings first to check the section and the custom before a stem is cut. In a suburb like this, that one call heads off a mistake no apology fixes.

If what turns up does not look right, send us a photo the same day on 1300 360 469 or to [email protected], and we will sort it with the florist while it can still be fixed. Most of the time it comes down to a substitution nobody mentioned. That is fixable early. Not three days later.

A note from Siobhan, the other half of Lily's Florist

The orders I think about most are the ones going to someone the sender cannot get to: an aged-care room, a hospital bed, a new mum who is underwater with a newborn. Here is the part nobody warns you about. The person you sent them to is often too flat out, or too unwell, or too overwhelmed to ring and say they arrived. That silence almost never means the flowers failed. More often it just means life is busy at the other end. If you want to know they landed, we can check for you (we would rather you asked than sat there worrying). That is what the phone number is for. And the gift has already done its work in that room, whether they have managed to tell you yet or not.

Phone is faster than email if it is time-sensitive. Either way, ask. We would rather hear from you on the day than read it in a review a week later.

ABN: 17 830 858 659