Same Day Flowers to Balga, Named for the Grass Tree

More mums get flowers in Balga than almost anywhere up north, and with nearly a quarter of families here headed by a single parent, more of them are doing the raising on their own. If you cannot be at her table yourself, the flowers take your place at it. The sender is often a kid or a partner working to what they can afford, and the quiet worry is that it turns up looking like the cheap option.

Mother's Day is the peak, and it falls on a Sunday, which we do not deliver, so the flowers go out the Saturday before. Order earlier than feels necessary. It is the highest-volume day of the year, and the buyer watching the price is the same one who tends to leave it late and get caught.

Skip the dozen soft roses when the budget has to stretch. A dozen roses at a fair price is a thin dozen, and thin shows. For the same money a florist can build something fuller from the stems that take a Perth afternoon, so it lands generous to begin with. What you are really paying for is the fortnight after, the week or two of her catching sight of them on the bench and thinking of you, long after the card has been read. The year-round version lives under flowers for Mum.

Balga has more little ones under five than the West Australian average, so the new-baby order is a regular one. Years back I used to run flowers into Murwillumbah Hospital myself, our own baby screaming in the back of the car, five minutes to get them to reception in the heat, so the picture in your head when you send to a maternity ward is one I have lived. The new parents are buried in visitors and short on sleep, and anything that turns up has to earn its bit of bench space without making more work.

Osborne Park Hospital, about six kilometres south, runs the maternity ward for this catchment. From what our florists have seen, ward flowers go to the main reception, get checked against the patient name, and a clerk or volunteer carries them through, usually within a few hours. Maternity stays are short, so if you are not certain she is still in, send to the home instead. Address it to the mother, not the baby. For the card, welcome to the world, little one does the job.

Anna, on what a maternity ward can actually take

No lilies near a newborn. The pollen is airborne, it travels on clothing from one bed to the next, and a maternity ward is the last place you want it drifting about. Keep the scent low too, nothing like stargazers or freesias in a small room. And send it in a box or a vase, never a hand-tied bunch, because the ward has no spare vase and nobody spare to hunt one down. If you want the lily look, ask for a pollen-free Asiatic. A good florist knows which ones those are.

This is one of the most mixed suburbs in the state, so a sympathy order can be for a Muslim or East African family, a Noongar family, a Vietnamese or a Catholic one, and the worry is sending the wrong thing into someone else's grief. Flowers will not carry the weight of it. They stand in for you when you cannot be in the room.

Sort it first by where it goes. Condolences go to the home. Service flowers go to the funeral director with the date. There is no cemetery in the suburb, so graveside tributes route out to Karrakatta, which holds the denominational sections, or to Pinnaroo Valley for a general service. For the card, plain holds best: thinking of you and your family. Write it like it will be kept, because the card tends to outlast the flowers by years and end up in a drawer.

The cultural ones came up enough on the phones that I kept a steady answer for them. For a Muslim family, keep it modest and white, send it to the home after the burial rather than the mosque, and check first, because some families want no flowers at all. For a Noongar family, ask before you send, and if flowers are welcome the West Australian natives that tie back to Country mean more than an imported rose ever will. Red is the one to keep well away from a Vietnamese or Buddhist service. White carries across nearly all of it. When you are not sure, white sympathy flowers are the safe ground, and the native tributes suit the families who want something that looks like home.

Plenty of Balga orders are none of the above: a thank you to the auntie who minds the kids, a thinking-of-you to someone having a hard month, a housewarming on a street someone has finally bought into.

When money is tight, the question is the same, and Anna has a clear answer.

Spend it on stems that work, not on a name. The hardy stems give you more flower for the money than a tight posy of shop roses, and they last roughly twice as long in this heat. If you want it to suit the place, lean native. If you would rather not choose at all, a florist's choice order lets the florist build to whatever came in best and strongest that morning, which on the West Australian native side is usually the pick of the bucket.