Have Box Hill Flowers on an Arnold Street Ward Today

You have a ward number off a text message and no idea whether it is still current. Building A is on Arnold Street and Building B is on Nelson Road, so the notes need the building as well as the ward. If the number is a day old, the switchboard will confirm the ward before you order. Hospital flowers and get well flowers both do better ordered early.

Anna, qualified florist

Low scent, low pollen, in a box. Nobody on a ward is going hunting for a vase, so a wrapped bunch becomes a job for a nurse with fourteen other things on. Epworth prohibits lilies by name. On the card, Thinking of you, hope you are on the mend does the whole job.

You are still working out where the service is and what the family would want. Flowers are a small thing against what has happened, and they are still what you send when you cannot be in the room. Condolences go to the house. Service flowers go to the funeral director with the date on them, and Le Pine on Whitehorse Road has twenty-five car spaces off Linsley Street, so early beats on time. Keep the card short: thinking of you and your family this week is enough. More people in this postcode speak Mandarin at home than speak English, so tell us how the family name should be written and whether the message goes in English. White sympathy flowers or funeral flowers both work.

On the two that catch people: keep red out of a sympathy order here. Chinese, Vietnamese and Buddhist services tend to read it as celebration, and that includes a red accent buried in the foliage. The exception runs the other way: for a Hindu family an all-white western wreath is usually the wrong answer, because the garlands are the family's own work and flowers to the home come after the cremation. Chrysanthemum is the third one that holds in a flat, and it is the one I would ask about before sending it to a house here. Ask the family whether they have a preference. One question, and most of the guesswork goes.

Somebody in the family has finished, and the handshake is happening somewhere you will not be. Deakin's Burwood campus graduates twice a year, February or March and again in June or July, and Box Hill Institute is on Whitehorse Road inside the suburb, so graduation flowers here are an autumn job and a winter one. Skip the venue, because the graduand has no fixed address that day. The house the night before or the workplace the morning after both have somebody in them to take it.

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.