Flowers to Bulleen, Between a Billabong and a Tunnel

Flowers will not fix this and you already know it. They say the thing you cannot say from four suburbs away, or four states. Then there are two decisions with a service time pressing on both: something for the church, something for the house afterwards. Close to half of Bulleen households are Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, so the useful line on the order is a question about the family's preference, and the florist works from the answer. Funeral flowers for the service, wreaths and sheaths where the tradition wants a circle. Get the order in the day before if you possibly can. A service that has already started cannot be caught up with.

Anna, on why the shape matters more than the flower. A Greek Orthodox wreath and an Italian Catholic casket spray both look like white flowers at a glance and are built for different jobs. The wreath is a closed circle on a frame, it goes at the church entrance where the family sees it walking in, and it travels upright. The spray is flat and weighted to sit on a lid. Order the wrong shape and it will not fit where it is going. One more thing worth knowing about Greek Orthodox families: the memorial cycle runs at forty days, three months, six months and a year, so if you are ordering the first one you will probably be ordering the fourth. Ask the florist to note the church and the wreath style now and it takes one phone call next time. Keep the card short. Thinking of you and your family is enough. The wreath stands at the church entrance for an hour. The card ends up in a drawer, and it is still there in five years when nobody can remember which flowers came.

The bench beside a hospital bed is about the width of a dinner plate and it is already carrying a jug, a charger and somebody's glasses. Whatever you send has to earn a spot on it. From what our florists have seen the flowers land at reception, get logged, and reach the bedside somewhere between half an hour and three hours later, so the ward number does more work on that order than anything else you type. Intensive care, oncology and haematology tend to take nothing at all, so wait until there is a ward before you order. Get well flowers and hospital arrangements are built for exactly this.

No pollen, no strong scent, and a vase or a box, because nobody on a ward has scissors and a jug to spare. If it turns out to be a palliative bed, send them anyway. Those rooms are where flowers do the most work, and the evidence is better than most people assume. In a randomised trial of ninety surgical patients, the ones recovering in rooms with plants and flowers took fewer painkillers, ran lower blood pressure and rated their pain and anxiety lower than the patients in the identical rooms without them. Ninety three per cent said they would choose the same room again. Nobody is claiming a bunch of gerberas is medicine. It is not nothing either. Hope you are on the mend does more than a paragraph.

Mercy Hospital for Women is the closest maternity and newborn hospital to Bulleen, a couple of kilometres west over the river, and a fair share of Manningham babies arrive there. They are exhausted, the room is small, and there are already three other gifts on the windowsill. Address it to the mother and put the ward on the order. A baby's name on a delivery docket stalls at reception. New baby flowers is the range built for it.

Anna's rule for a maternity room: nothing tall, nothing that needs a container found for it, and no lilies at all. Pollen near a newborn is a conversation nobody wants to have with a midwife, and the special care nursery will not take flowers under any circumstances. A compact vase arrangement in soft colours goes on the table and stays there until they go home. New parents read the card out loud to each other, usually at two in the morning, so it is worth spending a minute on. Two lines will do it. Welcome to the world, and get some sleep.

The last visit was longer ago than you meant it to be and the birthday has come around regardless. Bulleen's median age is 45, seven years above the Victorian figure, and plenty of the big birthdays that used to happen in these streets are now marked a few minutes east in Templestowe Lower. The shift catches people out. Put the facility on the order and reception signs for it, walks it through, and it is on the bedside table before lunch. 80th birthday flowers and birthday flowers for mum move most here.

Anna on what survives a bedside table

Keep it low and keep it in its own water. A tall arrangement gets shifted off the bedside table by day two and never comes back. If she has dementia, send what she would have grown. Roses, daisies, lavender. Familiar is the whole point, and something clever off a magazine cover can genuinely unsettle a room. And keep it away from the fruit bowl on a shared table, because a carnation that would run three weeks in a cool room is finished in three days next to a ripening banana. Ethylene does that. Chrysanthemums are the exception and do not care at all.

You have read all four and still cannot pick. Fair enough. Naming the occasion was never a requirement here, and if you are stuck deciding whether this counts as sympathy or as thinking of you, you do not have to work that out. Say in one line what has happened and the florist picks the register.

Anna's pick for a Bulleen address

A mixed seasonal arrangement in a vase, whites and soft greens, built on chrysanthemum and lisianthus with whatever foliage is strongest that morning. Chrysanthemum because it ignores ethylene, lisianthus because it opens over a week and keeps the arrangement changing. It works at a front door, at a bedside and at a house after a funeral, which is more than most choices manage. Whites read as considered, so it will not land wrong if you have guessed the mood. If you are ordering between June and August, say yes to whatever the florist has in ranunculus, tulips or stock. Cool season stems are at their peak then, and they will never look better than they do in a cold Bulleen kitchen. A June bunch is still changing on day six. Six mornings she walks past it and thinks of you, for the money a February bunch turns into three.