Flowers to Bassendean, Delivered to the Right Side of the Line

Flowers will not fix what has happened, and you already know that. What they do is stand in for you in a room you cannot get to, on a day you cannot make.

Sort it by where it goes. Condolences go to the home, in the first few days. Flowers for a service go to the funeral director or the venue with the date and the family name, not to the house. Bassendean has no cemetery of its own, so graveside tributes route out to Guildford, a few minutes east. From what the florists who cover the area have found, a good share of services here are held at a function space or a graveside rather than a church, so the safest move is to give us the venue and the time and let the order arrive before people do, not as it starts.

For a celebration of a life, the white-only rule can go out the window. White is the safe ground when you know nothing about the person, and for a Catholic requiem it is exactly right. But this is a town that sends more people off from a function room or a graveside than from a pew, and when a family has built the day around who someone really was, an all-white sheaf can read as the formality they were dodging. The flowers fade inside two weeks, but the card is the part the family keeps, sometimes in a drawer for years, so make it carry: their name, one true thing, and with our love. Send flowers for the service only once you have the where and the when.

Sending flowers to someone who is recovering, when you cannot be the one bringing soup, is a particular kind of helpless. Most of the get well orders into Bassendean are like that: not to a hospital bed but to a home, where someone is a week into mending and the days are long.

There is no hospital in Bassendean itself. If your person is on a ward, that is St John of God in Midland, about five kilometres east, and hospital flowers go to the main reception, where staff walk them through to the bedside. Put the patient's full name and the ward on the order, and only send once they are actually on a ward, not still in emergency. We used to run these drops ourselves in the early days, one of us with a newborn screaming in the back of the car and five minutes to get a bunch to a reception desk, so the ward process is not theory to us. For a recovery at home, the door is the whole job, and a get well bunch can go bigger and brighter than a ward will take. On the card, lighter lands best: thinking of you, hope the worst of it is behind you.

Anna, on what a sickroom can take

The ward calls taught me one rule above the rest: skip the lilies. The pollen travels, it is the last thing a maternity room or a shared bay wants, and a heavy scent in a closed room stops being a kindness fast. Keep it compact and let it earn its bench space. If you want it still going strong when the next visitor comes, carnations and chrysanthemums hold for a fortnight in a warm room, and lisianthus is not far behind. Gerbera looks the part but bends at the neck within a few days once the air is warm, so it is the wrong pick when it has to last the stay.

She is turning seventy and you are interstate, so the flowers go to the table in your place. They are a small celebration and a small apology at once, because everyone at that table will know you would rather be in the room. Bassendean skews older and settled, and a good share of the birthdays here are the round-number ones, the sixtieth and the seventieth, for a mum or an old friend who has seen plenty of bunches before.

The catch is who is home. A fair few older residents here do not drive, so a missed delivery is not something they can pop out and collect from a depot. When you order, give us an authority to leave and a shaded spot out of the afternoon sun, or a mobile to ring, and the morning run sorts the rest.

On what to actually send a seventieth, Anna has a firm view.

Send her something she has not had twenty times. At that age a standard mixed bunch is wallpaper. The ones who rang back pleased were almost always the ones I steered off the dozen red roses: for a seventieth I would thread a few kangaroo paw through a loose bunch, or build the whole thing in one strong colour, and that was the version that got a photo sent back. It also has to survive the porch, so I would sooner a milestone landed in chrysanthemums and kangaroo paw that look sharp at six in the evening than roses that cooked by lunch. Order it ahead if you can. It is the one birthday you do not want arriving the day after.

Plenty of Bassendean orders are none of those three: a thank-you to a teacher near the strip, a new baby down at the maternity ward in Midland, a just-because for someone who has been quiet lately. Forget finding the perfect category. Suit the person and the porch, and you are most of the way there.

If you want me to pick, send a boxed flower arrangement of natives. It gives more flower for the money, it keeps a fortnight in the air-conditioning most of these houses run, and it needs no vase hunted down and no water changed, which matters when the person it is going to cannot easily do either. Most of those stems grew in this state rather than on a truck across the country, and on a Bassendean doorstep that is exactly the toughness you want.