Same Day Flower Delivery Bar Beach, Intercoms and All

It's their birthday and you can't be there. Send the birthday flowers to their home so they last the week, or, for a lunch at the Bar Beach Bowling and Sports Club on Kilgour Avenue (a 50th, say), put the function room and the host's mobile in the notes. I learned function deliveries in 2007, crossing the car park at Cudgen Headland Surf Club in Kingscliff into a southerly. The cellophane left first. The flowers made it. Bar Beach cops the same southerlies, which is one more reason a club lunch is better served by an arrangement than a wrapped bunch.

Anna's call: nobody at a club table has a vase, so send the Florists Choice Birthday Arrangement, already sitting in foam and water.

Twenty years or two, and you want the flowers there while someone is home. Bar Beach has older unit blocks, a few of them Art Deco, and in our experience an intercom with no lobby is common, so a mobile number in the notes is usually what gets the anniversary flowers upstairs. If your other half will be at work that day, send romantic flowers there instead.

Sunlight breaks down the pigment in red petals, so on a sunny windowsill they drift toward pink within a couple of days. A little back from the window, red holds its colour, which is why 3 Wrapped Red Roses look their best on a side table.

There's a notice in the Newcastle Herald and a family you'd rather not ring with questions. Sympathy flowers to the home need only the address and the family's name. If the service is at St John's Anglican in Cooks Hill, on the corner of Darby and Parry Streets, or the Meighans chapel on Lambton Road, Broadmeadow, put the venue, the start time and the name of the person who has died in the notes. A card can be short: "Thinking of you all, with love." Flowers are a small thing against a funeral, and people still remember who sent them.

Anna, on keeping white clean

White suits a service and keeps clean longest in a cool room out of the sun. Warmth slowly browns the edges of every petal, and on white you see it first, so the Gorgeous Whites Bunch wants the shady side of the house.

A new job, a house sold, a friend's rough month. Plenty of orders don't fit a category, and you don't need one. Our florist's choice range leaves the picking to the florist, and Anna has a favourite of her own.

Go with the Blissful Botanics Arrangement: white roses and green spider chrysanthemums in wet foam inside a silver cube, so there's no vase to find. Foam holds water but goes stale if it's ignored, so every second day, squeeze fresh water into it until it stops drinking.