Same Day Flowers in Balmain

You can't be at the table on the day, so the flowers go instead. Our birthday flowers for mum lean soft and pretty, and the 50th birthday flowers carry more weight for a big number. Plenty of Balmain front doors open straight onto the footpath, and a bunch left on that step sits in full view of the street, so add their mobile in the notes and the florist can ring ahead.

Anna's tip: if the bunch has lilies, pinch the anthers out of each one as it opens. Dry pollen bonds to fabric, and a terrace hallway is narrow enough that somebody always brushes past the vase.

Balmain Hospital on Booth Street does a lot of rehab and aged care, and a stay there can run for weeks. In our experience flowers go to the ward desk and the staff take them in, so put the ward and the patient's full name in the notes. I learnt why in 2007, delivering to Murwillumbah Hospital with our daughter Asha a few weeks old and screaming in the back, 37 degrees, nowhere to park. Not the moment to be guessing at the desk. Home already? Send get well flowers there. Card idea: "Thinking of you. Hope you're on the mend."

Anna, on a ward with no vases

A boxed arrangement suits a ward, because nobody there has a spare vase. Its foam goes stale within days and the stems rot from the base, so draw the old water out with a sports bottle and refill it every few days. Do that and the arrangement lasts a longer stay.

Someone has died and you're sorting the flowers from somewhere else. First question: the service, or the family's home? For a funeral at St Augustine's in Balmain, or the chapel at Mannings Funerals on Victoria Road in Rozelle, put the service time in the notes and choose from our funeral flowers. For the house, pick something that arrives already in a vase. On the card, "Thinking of you all" is enough.

Back on the bench at Salt, sympathy work going to a house always had lilies in it. The buds open one after another, so sympathy lilies still look new into the second week. Pull each bloom as it browns and nobody can tell the first ones have gone.

Plenty of orders don't fit a heading: a new job, a thank you to the neighbour who fed the cat, a renovation finally finished. Anna has a pick for those.

The Gorgeous White Arrangement, from the white flowers. White suits most occasions and any room, and it stays cleanest in a cool spot out of the sun, which in a terrace is the middle room. Keep it off the front windowsill and it holds its colour longest.