Buderim Flowers: One Hill, Never One Kind of Address

Somebody is two nights post-surgery on Elsa Wilson Drive and you are somewhere else. Half the orders we run into that building come from people who do not yet know whether they are celebrating or bracing. Flowers work either way, which is more than the phone call manages. Sort the address first: a day procedure means they are home by dinner. Thirteen years of covering this hill tells me the deliveries that stall are the ones missing a ward name. Named, it goes to reception and, in our experience, travels to the bedside with the round. New baby flowers go under the mother's name. Everything else is get well, and two card lines that carry in a ward are thinking of you, and no rush getting home.

Anna, qualified florist

Day two, not day one. One-night stay, send it to the house. And send it boxed, because under those flowers is a block of soaked floral foam doing the job a vase would do. Nobody on the ward has to hunt out a container, cut stems or top up water, and that is the whole point when the clerk has eleven other things on. Keep it off a sunny sill and it holds. Let the foam dry right out and it never takes water back the same way.

The other reason a box beats a wrapped bunch here has a clock in it. Between the front desk and the bedside there is a wait, and how long it runs is nobody's fault. A wrapped bunch spends it out of water. A box spends it drinking.

People do ask whether it is worth bothering at all. Park and Mattson put ninety surgical patients through a randomised trial in 2008. The ones recovering in rooms with flowers used fewer painkillers and ran lower blood pressure. The effect is measurable.

Flowers do not cover what has happened. They mark that you tried to, from wherever you are. The practical half is that Buderim runs three kinds of venue: the crematorium chapel on Mooloolaba Road, a service through Gregson and Weight on Wises Road, and a church morning at St Mark's or Buderim Uniting. Give the venue and the time. A late birthday delivery is disappointing. A funeral delivery that misses the service cannot be recovered at all, and there is no second attempt at it. If you are unsure what this family would want, say so on the order and the florist will ask.

Two hours clear of the service. A chapel running back to back has nowhere to put an early wreath or sheaf and nobody free to take a late one, and the funeral director is working to a schedule that has nothing to do with ours. On colour, white and the soft tones read safely across almost every tradition and they hold up better in a chapel with no air conditioning than anything bright does. Chrysanthemum and carnation carry a fortnight in a vase back at the house afterwards, which is the part the family lives with. Funeral tributes go to the venue.

You meant to get up there more often than you did. A good share of the milestone orders we run to this hill are carrying that, and flowers do not settle it. What they do is put something of yours in the room on the day. Villa or care suite decides the format: one takes a vase at a front door, the other a box at a desk. Put the full name, the village and the villa or wing in the notes. A desk holds a delivery for a resident it can identify and turns away one it cannot. A seventieth is a busier week for us here than a twenty-first. And if this is the same order you placed last year, say so, because nobody wants the same bunch twice in the same room. Mother's Day compounds all of it: a wing that takes three deliveries on a Tuesday takes fifty that morning.

Two hundred metres of elevation does more to a stem than people expect. The air runs a few degrees under the coast on the same afternoon, and cooler air slows respiration, the single biggest lever on vase life. June and July are the best two months of the year to send something delicate here. A tulip that runs a week up here in July is finished inside three days in February. Size is the other half of it. A care-suite bedside table is already competing with a water jug, a phone and a photo frame, so build low and wide. Tall loses.

One thing people do not picture until they have walked one of those corridors. Your arrangement is never sitting on its own. It is on a bedside table in a row of them, and on a Mother's Day morning every one has something on it. Spend on stems that still look like something on day nine, when half the row has gone over. Size will not do that for you.

None of the three fit, or you do not know which door yet. My first ever flower call, I put the woman on hold and went out the back to ask my wife. Anna has a better answer than I had.

Send a mixed box. That is the short answer. If you are in a hurry, take it and go. The long version is that a box works on a reception counter, a bedside table or a front step, and a vase only works on the last of those. Ask for chrysanthemum through the spine, a couple of gerberas for colour and something waxy for structure. Chrysanthemum holds 14 to 24 days in a normal Buderim lounge room and carnation 14 to 21, which is why so much of what goes to a village desk is built on them. Watch the gerbera. The stems are hollow and bacteria colonise the base fast, so it wants clean water behind it. Three stem types also fade at different rates, so each gets its day and you get a fortnight of something changing, then one good Monday. Buy colour and volume over cleverness, and put any extra budget into stem quality over size. A bigger bunch in a small room becomes somebody's problem by Thursday. A mixed box is the widest spread of colour for the money.