Flowers to Blackheath, Where the Cold Is on Your Side

You are arranging a funeral's flowers from down the mountain, or from further than that, and you already know flowers do not touch what has happened. Send them anyway. What you need first is not a bouquet. It is an address.

More than half of Blackheath told the census they have no religion, so a good share of services here are in a hall, a gallery or somebody's garden. St John's and St Patrick's take the rest. Ask the family who is opening up and when, because a hall has nobody at a desk and a celebration of life is often set later in the week than a funeral. A card reading "thinking of you all this week" assumes nothing about faith.

White is the safe answer nearly everywhere and here it is the wrong one more often than people expect. Ask what the person grew. Yours will stand alongside other people's and everyone at the service reads them. Banksia and gum hold their shape for days in a cold hall. Red is the one colour I leave alone unless the family ask for it. Send it to the service or to the house, and if it is the house, keep the scent down.

It has been longer than you meant since you rang, and flowers are easier than the phone call. That counts as a reason.

Blackheath has two versions of an empty house. Nearly a quarter of the dwellings here were unoccupied on census night, so a fair number are weekenders nobody opens until Friday. The rest belong to people who are home all day and have been for years. Our first winter with the Kingscliff shop, back in 2007, you could stand on that main street at three on a Wednesday and not see a soul, so an empty town is a thing we recognise. Give us the arrival day and we hold it to that. Our drivers use the same three spots on a mountain house: an enclosed porch, the lee side out of the westerly, or under the tank stand.

Anna, on what survives a wait: chrysanthemum and carnation both carry a waxy petal that holds its water, and both forgive a cold porch. Sweet pea and freesia love the same cool room, but a dry draught finishes them, so they want somebody there to bring them in. One thing to know: chrysanthemum reads as a funeral flower in Italian and Chinese households, so if that is the house, stock or lisianthus does the same job. Thinking of you needs no explaining on the card.

You cannot get up there to sit in the chair beside the bed, so you are sending something instead and hoping it is not the wrong thing.

Most people picture the flowers going to the room. They go to main reception, and everything after that is timing. The hospital for the upper mountain is Blue Mountains District ANZAC Memorial, on the Great Western Highway at Katoomba. Order once they are on a ward, because emergency and recovery are both too early, and give us the full name and the ward. From what our florists see, the ward clerk carries them up inside three hours. Intensive care tends not to take them.

Blackheath has no residential aged care at all, so many frail-aged people here are supported at home through the neighbourhood centre, and more get-well flowers in this town go to a front door than to a ward. A house on carer hours has somebody in it at set times and nobody otherwise, so tell us the window. And if they are frailer than they have let on, the flowers may mean more to you than to them. That is all right. They still go.

Anna, qualified florist

Send a box, not a hand-tied bunch. A ward keeps no spare vases, so a hand-tie turns into a nurse hunting for a container, and that job goes to the bottom of a long list. A box carries its own water. Leave the lilies out too: one Oriental stem scents a four-bed room and the pollen travels on uniforms. Gerbera, carnation and chrysanthemum are the ward stems, under 30 centimetres so it fits a bed table. Hospital flowers is the safest place to start.

You will not be at the table, so the flowers go and stand in for you. They have to look like you meant it.

The median age here is 53, fourteen years above the state figure, which makes 60ths and 70ths the birthdays that come through this page. Unlike the weekenders, these houses have somebody in them, and a midweek run to a retired household gets answered at the door more often than it gets a safe drop. If you are reading this at twenty to two, you have twenty minutes and it still lands today.

Anna, on what a garden town notices: people here have grown camellias and rhododendrons for decades and they will spot a tired lily well before you do. Carnation gives 18 to 24 days in a room this cool and cymbidium gives 21 to 28. A 60th here does better with something structural, and the arrangement is usually still standing after the card comes down.

Plenty of orders fit none of those. The neighbour who watched the house all winter. The apology you would sooner not spell out.

If you want one answer for this town, make it the Australian Natives Bunch. Banksia heads, gum and waxflower, weight kept low so it does not go over on a car seat coming up the highway. Australian-grown, no air freight, and they dry out where a soft stem would rot in a cold room. Waratah is the showpiece, but the season is short and the price follows it, so ask before you count on it. Otherwise Florist's Choice gets the best thing off the market that day, and in June that is a longer list than in January.

One last thing before you look at price. A stem holds two to three times longer in a Blackheath living room than in a Sydney one, and that is what the money buys. The middle of the range here is not the extravagance it looks like on a product page. Whichever one you pick, somebody will still be looking at it a fortnight from now, on an ordinary Thursday you will never hear about.