Same Day Flower Delivery Bridges, on the Sunshine Coast

It's their birthday, you're a long way off, and the address is a number on a road you've never driven. Birthday flowers can still go out today. Bridges shares the 4561 postcode with Yandina and its neighbours, so the road name and a word about the letterbox do the finding.

I learned that in 2007, with a birthday bunch for Stotts Creek, which shares the 2487 postcode with Kingscliff, where our shop was on Marine Parade. I had never heard of it. The only thing I knew on Leddays Creek Road was the tip, so that's where I ended up, flowers on the passenger seat, at the weighbridge. The man in the booth asked if the flowers were for the green waste, then sent me two gates further up.

Anna's pick: the Australian Natives Bunch, which suits a birthday at almost any age, his or hers. If there's banksia or protea in it, the heads dry on a shelf for months afterwards.

Someone's had a fall or an operation, and you only half know where they are now. Still in Nambour General? Send hospital flowers with the ward name; in our experience a nurse collects them from the ward desk. Home already? Get well flowers go to the house instead. A card line that works: "Mend quick. The paddock can wait."

Anna, on a shared room

In a shared room, gerberas and chrysanthemums carry next to no perfume to bother the next bed, and an arrangement that arrives already sitting in water means nobody on the ward goes hunting for a vase.

There's a service time, and a family you want to reach twice: on the day, and when the house goes quiet. Put the funeral director's name and the service time in the notes. At a graveside such as Yandina Cemetery on Cordwell Road, a sheath (a flat, tied spray) from our wreaths and sheaths lies flat on the grave where a vase would tip. A week on, sympathy flowers for home arrive after the visitors have gone. Flowers can't do much against a death, and families still read every card. "Thinking of you all, today and after" is enough.

White and cream sit quietly beside the sympathy cards on a mantelpiece, and chrysanthemum lasts a fortnight or more in a mild room.

Can't choose? Or is it a new job, a thank-you, or no reason at all beyond thinking of them? Anna has a view on this.

Send the Beautiful Pastels Bunch. Soft colours read as kind whatever the reason, and they sit well in any room, farmhouse kitchen or hospital ward.