Brighton Flowers, SA: There Are Three Brightons

Ordering flowers when someone has died is one of those tasks you do on autopilot, in a gap between two phone calls, half hoping the website will make the decisions for you. So here is the decision, made.

Two sorts, and the first one nobody says out loud: how well did you know them. If you were close, nothing you send will feel like enough, and that feeling is no sign you have chosen wrong. If you were not close, a sheath to the service is a complete gesture and you do not owe anyone more than that.

The second sort is the address, and there are two orders in it. Flowers for the service go to the church or the graveside and they have a start time. Flowers for the family go to the house and they can arrive any day that week. If you only send one, send the one to the house, because it is still there on the Tuesday when everyone has gone home. Our florists will not guess a church for you. If the delivery notes say "St Jude's" and nothing else, we ring you back, because we have had a sheath arrive at a locked building before and we would sooner waste ten minutes on the phone than repeat it. Send a funeral tribute to the service, and sympathy flowers to the home afterwards. On the card, "Thinking of you and your family" is enough.

One more thing worth knowing about this suburb in particular. A lot of Brighton services now are celebrations of life rather than traditional funerals, and the families who plan them tend to want something that looks like the person. If your friend gardened, say so in the notes. If he bushwalked every weekend, native stems will say more than a white bunch will. Those orders carry meaning a standard sheath never does.

Anna, qualified florist

Coffin sheaths are built flat, to be read from one side, which is the opposite of everything else on the bench. I steered callers toward chrysanthemum and leucadendron through the spine every time, and I still would. Both outlast a rose by weeks in a cool room, and a sheath sits in a chapel for hours before anybody looks at it properly. The rose is prettier at ten in the morning. The chrysanthemum is the one still holding its shape at the wake. If you do want white lilies in it, and they are traditional for a reason, ask the florist to take the anthers out as the blooms open. Oriental lily pollen is rust-brown, it stains permanently, and it will find the white ribbon. One last thing, and it undercuts everything I just said about stems. Spend longer on the card than on the flowers. People rang me back weeks later quoting the card at me. Nobody ever rang to talk about what was in the bunch. The flowers go out with the bin on Thursday. The card ends up in a drawer for years.

You may not know yet whether this is a good-news order or a frightening one. Day surgery covers both and the flowers do not have to decide. Hospital or home recovery, though, is a decision, and in Brighton the answer is almost always home, which surprises people who have just read an address with the word "surgery" in it.

Brighton Day Surgery is at 1 Jetty Road and Hove Day Surgery is about a kilometre south on Brighton Road. Both are same-day facilities. Brighton Day Surgery has three beds. Nobody is staying the night, and in our experience a patient booked in at 8am is in a car by early afternoon. So flowers timed to arrive at the clinic that afternoon arrive at a reception desk that is packing up, for someone who left an hour ago. I have stood at a hospital reception desk with an armful of flowers and five minutes of parking, newborn Asha screaming in the back of the car, 37 degrees outside, in the days when we did the deliveries ourselves. You do not forget what that desk is like at the wrong end of the day. Send them to the house the next morning instead. Same get well flowers, arriving when the person is there to see them, on the day they feel worst rather than the day they were unconscious for. If your person has actually been admitted overnight, that is a different order and a different building, most likely Flinders Medical Centre about nine kilometres south-east. Ring us and we will route it to the ward instead.

Do not send a wrapped bunch to anyone post-anaesthetic. They have been told to keep away from the car keys and anything sharp for the rest of the day. Then they are handed a bouquet that needs scissors, a vase and ten minutes at a sink. Send it in water. A box or a vase arrangement goes straight onto the bench and asks nothing of them. Two more things from the bench. Keep it off the kitchen counter if there is fruit on it, because ripening fruit gives off ethylene and carnations are very sensitive to it; a fruit bowl in the same room can have them curling and going to sleep inside a day. And skip the heavy oriental lilies, which are banned outright at some private hospitals for the pollen and are simply too much scent for someone who has had a general. Carnations, lisianthus and spray roses. Quiet, upright, no fragrance argument. And they earn their place past looking quiet. A randomised trial of ninety surgical patients found the ones recovering in rooms with flowers needed fewer painkillers and ran lower blood pressure than the ones without. Ninety patients, randomised, published.

You cannot be at the table. Someone will hold the phone up so you can sing, the sound will be terrible, and the flowers will be the thing in the room that is actually from you.

The median age in Brighton is 49 and there are five aged care and retirement addresses within a couple of kilometres of the jetty. Alwyndor at Hove has around 134 residents; Calvary at South Brighton takes up to 76. Reception desks that size are logging deliveries all day, and in our experience the flowers reach the room on the same round as the mail. Put the resident's full name and their room or unit number in the delivery notes, not just the facility. "Margaret, Alwyndor" gets there. It just gets there slower, via someone at a desk working out which Margaret. 80th birthday flowers and arrangements both work here, and the choice between them is not aesthetic. And if she is in a memory unit, the flowers might mean more to you than they do to her. Send them anyway.

People assume the bigger bunch is the more generous one. Anna spent years telling them otherwise.

A hand-tied bunch and a box arrangement cost about the same and behave completely differently in a care room. The bunch needs a vase, and the room does not have one, so it sits in its wrapping on a bench until a visitor solves it, which can be Thursday. Even where there is a vase, staff have a hundred other jobs and the water does not get changed; foam and self-watering boxes take that off their list. The other half of it is scale, and this is the part I could never talk a caller out of. A care room bedside table is roughly a dinner plate once you account for the water jug, the glasses and the phone. Low, front-facing, in water, under about 35cm. And if the birthday is in a dementia wing, go familiar over impressive. Roses, daisies, lavender if she kept a garden. Something she recognises from her own life. Nothing off a magazine cover. Nothing toxic either, no bulbs, no lily of the valley, because residents do sometimes taste the flowers or drink the vase water.

Plenty of Brighton orders do not sit neatly in any of the three. Someone is unwell and you do not know how unwell. Someone has moved into care and there is no occasion attached to it at all, just a first week that will be hard. You have heard something second-hand and you are not entitled to the details. None of that needs a category. The categories on this page are our filing system. You cannot pick the wrong one.

The instinct is to reach for florist's choice and let someone else decide, and on most suburbs Anna would let you. Not here. Nearly every address on this page is a room, a desk or a chapel rather than a kitchen, and there is one thing that works in all three: flowers that arrive in their own vase. No hunting for a container in a facility that does not own one. No wrapping left on a bench. It goes down where it lands and it stays upright. If you want it to read as gentle instead of celebratory, ask for white and cream in the notes and the florist will build to it. That single line in the notes does more work than the product you pick.