Flowers to Blue Mountain Heights

It's a 50th or a 60th, you can't be there, and you want to know someone will be home. In 2008 I carried a 60th birthday arrangement up a driveway on Scenic Drive, Bilambil Heights, a ridge suburb back home on the Tweed with houses tucked into the trees like here, Asha on my hip, and knocked on the wrong door. The woman knew exactly who I meant, walked the flowers across herself, and I'm fairly sure stayed for cake. I was mortified. She wasn't.

Streets like that tend to look after each other. Pick from the 50th birthday flowers or our best-selling birthday flowers.

Anna's pick: in a big room, height reads as occasion. Flowers about one and a half times the height of the vase look like a celebration from across the lounge.

Another year together, and you'd like it marked from wherever you are. Decide first who should see them turn up: the two of them at home, or a whole office at morning tea. Romantic flowers suit either, and so do roses.

Roses at work make a moment in front of people. At home they last longer out of the afternoon sun, with the stems recut at about forty-five degrees on the first day. A flat cut sits against the bottom of the vase and the water stops moving up.

Someone has died, and you're sorting it from wherever you are, the notice open on your phone. Funeral flowers go in ahead of the service, to the chapel at Australian Heritage Funerals on James Street, say, or to St Anne's on Highfields Road, and in our experience the funeral director has them set out before anyone arrives. Sympathy flowers for home can follow a day or two later. On the card: "Thinking of you all. Love from us." It's a strange day to be choosing colours, and it still helps to have chosen.

Too early, and a tribute dries out in a back room. The florists I worked with rang the funeral director for the delivery window.

Half the orders we get don't fit a heading: get well flowers for someone at St Andrew's on North Street, a thinking of you bunch for a mum at Brownesholme on Highfields Road. Those tend to go to the front desk first, and the staff carry them through. "Thinking of you. Home soon." is plenty.

Anna, for the smaller room

This is where I'd go the other way from the lilies. A small room holds scent close, so send something arranged in its own base, like the Blue Mist Arrangement, and save the Orientals for when they're home.