Bibra Lake Flowers, for the Days the Whole Suburb Turns Up

The first thing to sort is where it goes. Flowers to the family home in the days after a death, or flowers to the service itself. They are two different gestures and both are right. For a service, the safest move is to give us the church or funeral home and the date and time, and let the florist work back from there. Fremantle Cemetery handles most of the burials out this way, and the timing on a graveside is tighter than people expect.

Flowers do not undo what has happened. They tell the family you stood with them, even from a distance.

Anna, qualified florist

There are three sympathy looks I get asked to compare, and they sort by family more than by taste. A white circular wreath for a Greek Orthodox service, built to stand at the church door. White lilies and white roses for an Italian Catholic funeral, where families order generously and a larger casket spray is normal. And for a secular service, more and more people want native stems. Banksia and kangaroo paw, the same plants that grow wild around the lake the Whadjuk Noongar named Walubup, long before it was Bibra Lake. Those root a person to this place in a way an imported rose never will. If you are writing a card and the words will not come, "thinking of you and your family" is enough. It always has been.

Most hospital orders from Bibra Lake go to Fiona Stanley, about five kilometres north at Murdoch. Sending flowers to a ward when you cannot be there yourself is a strange kind of helpless, so here is what actually happens to them. The florist delivers to the main reception, the ward clerk logs them, and the nursing staff bring them to the bedside on their round, usually within thirty minutes to a few hours depending how busy the ward is. Put the patient's full name and the ward on the order. For a stay under a couple of days, ring the ward first, because people get discharged faster than you would think.

Anna has one firm rule about what to send there.

Skip the lilies. The pollen is a problem in a clean ward, and the scent is too much in a small room where someone is recovering. I steer get well orders toward carnations and chrysanthemums in a box, not a hand-tied bunch. A box arrives standing in its own water. A wrapped bunch needs a vase and scissors, and nobody on a ward has either to spare. Yellow lifts a room without shouting. "Thinking of you, hope you are on the mend" on the card does the rest.

A lot of these orders come from adult children who left Bibra Lake years ago and whose parents never did. You cannot be at the table, so the flowers go in your place, and the trick is that they should arrive before the family does and still look good after everyone has gone home. An 80th or a 70th here is a community event, marked the way Greek and Italian families have always marked them. Most homes are big and empty during the day, so if nobody will be in, tell us where to leave them safely. A box on a shaded porch beats a bunch baking on a hot step.

The month decides the flower more than the budget does. In a Bibra Lake summer, the afternoon climbs into the low thirties with the air bone dry. A rose left on a doorstep at two o'clock is wilting before anyone gets home at five, and a hydrangea is worse again, it drinks close to a litre of water a day and can fold on a hot step inside a couple of hours. For a January or February delivery I push the hardier stems, carnations and chrysanthemums, ten to fourteen days against a rose's three or four. In winter it flips. June and July are when Perth flowers last longest, and a bunch of roses will go the full fortnight. A ninetieth in July can have whatever it wants.

Plenty of orders to Bibra Lake do not sit neatly in any of the above. Someone who has not been well for a long time. A neighbour you have meant to check on. A resident at BaptistCare Lakeside Village, where the flowers go to the village reception rather than the villa door, and staff carry them through. You do not need the right category for any of that. You need the flowers to arrive, and to last.

For a room where nobody changes the water but the person living in it, send a carnation. It forgives a missed water change better than anything I know, two weeks in a stable vase without fuss. Carnations shrug off the heat too. The thing that finishes them early is the fruit bowl, of all things, since ripening fruit gives off a gas that ages the flowers, so keep the vase on a side table rather than the kitchen bench. The aged care calls I took nearly always came down to the same worry, that the flowers would be dead before the next visit. A low, weighted arrangement that cannot tip, in carnations or a few natives, takes that worry off the table. If you would rather hand the choice over, our florist's choice lets them build from the best stems that came in that morning, and native arrangements sit somewhere between a gift and something that simply belongs in the room.