Blackburn Flowers Built to Survive the Handover

Ask me for something impressive and I will steer you the other way. In a dementia wing the flower that works is the one the resident can still name. Roses. Daisies. Nothing exotic, and nothing off the toxic list either, because residents do eat flowers and drink out of vases. Foam takes the vase out of it. Keep it off a bedside table with fruit on it: a banana puts out enough ethylene to cost a carnation two days. And the carnations are the point. They are still standing at around fourteen days, when the roses are done.

Lilies are the one I would have pulled off a ward order without being asked. The private hospitals I dealt with around Box Hill were the strictest on them, and it was never fussiness about the smell. Stargazer pollen lifts off the anther, lands on a uniform and rides into the next room on somebody's shoulder. That is how a patient who never had flowers ends up reacting to them. Peace lilies and orchids are a different plant and nobody minds those. Do not switch to a potted plant either. In a clinical room the soil is the risk, not the flower.

Do not leave this one baking on a step waiting for somebody to come home. The proteas forgive you. The waxflower will not, and it fails in a way that looks like sabotage: under water stress the plant makes its own ethylene, the gas that tells a flower it is finished, and every little bloom drops off the stem at once. It looks like someone shook it over a bin. Indoors through a Blackburn winter the bunch runs a fortnight. In a February lounge room with no air conditioning, take three days off.

White carries almost everything in this postcode. Catholic, Anglican, Chinese, Buddhist. Red is the one to never send to a funeral in any of them; in a Chinese household it reads as celebrating the death. Chrysanthemums run the other way: correct at a Chinese funeral, never a birthday gift to a Chinese family. Two places white itself is wrong. A Hindu family arranges its own garlands and will not want a Western wreath, so send fruit to the house after the cremation, and there are more Hindu households here than Greek ones. And a celebration of life for somebody with no religion, close to half of Blackburn, is where a white wreath says the opposite of the person. Send what they grew.

June to August is the best flower buying of the year in this state and nobody says so, because it is not a gifting season. Tulips, ranunculus, sweet peas and stock all peak together. The reason is temperature. A cut flower burns stored sugar the whole time it is open, and burns it roughly twice as fast for every ten degrees warmer the room is. Scoresby, the nearest long-record station to Blackburn, sits on a July mean maximum of 13.2 degrees. A rose gives you ten to fourteen days in July against seven to ten in February. Indoors the heater shortens it, not the weather.