Same Day Flowers to Austinmer, Still Standing at Six

Flowers will not touch what has happened and you know that. What they do is stand in a room you cannot get to.

Funeral or family home, two addresses, both right. Condolences go to the house. Service flowers go to the funeral directors at Bulli with the chapel and service time on the order, and the family will know which cemetery is theirs. Sympathy to the home goes the same afternoon.

Colour is where this suburb stops behaving like the rest of the country.

Just over half of Austinmer wrote no religion on the last census, so white is right in a chapel and a coin toss at a celebration of life. Ask what she grew and what colour she wore. If nobody knows, send banksia and kangaroo paw. Keep the card short; thinking of you and your family is enough.

It has been a while, and you do not need a better reason. Nearly every bed within ten kilometres of Austinmer is long-stay, so thinking of you carries better than get well. In our experience it lands at reception under her full name, and nobody on that floor has ten minutes for vase water, which is the argument for an arrangement that carries its own. If the room is a dementia unit, the flowers may mean more to you than to her. Send them anyway.

Anna on what survives a room nobody attends to

Chrysanthemum, carnation and lisianthus: two weeks with no attention, no scent for a shared bay, no staining pollen on a bed table. If comfort matters more than longevity, send what she gardened.

Neither card above has to match. A birthday here has its own problem: four in ten residents are professionals working sixteen kilometres down the road, so the house is empty until six.

Send the sixty to eighty dollar box and let the florist pick the stems.

The bigger number changes the character of a bunch before it changes the size. Under sixty dollars is a smaller version of the same idea. Above eighty you move into protea and orchid. In the middle, natives give the longest life per dollar we sell.