Flower Delivery to Gungahlin: Birthdays, Babies, Funerals

It's their birthday, you're nowhere near Canberra, and they left for work hours ago. Home or office? At a desk, everyone sees them (and they get asked who they're from all afternoon). At home, if it's one of the blocks around Gungahlin Place, the building name, unit number and a mobile in the notes get birthday flowers past an intercom nobody answers, and from what we've seen a neighbour or the building manager minds them till evening.

Anna's pick: the Australian Natives Bunch. Woody stems shrug off a heated flat in winter and the air conditioning in summer. If there's a protea in it, split the base a couple of centimetres when it goes into water. The stem is too dense to drink through a clean cut, and without the split the head starts to nod.

A new baby in the family, and so far one blurry photo. Still in hospital? Check which: North Canberra Hospital on Mary Potter Circuit, Bruce, or the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children in Garran. Hospital flowers tend to go to the ward desk, and a midwife takes them through. Already home? A week in is lovely (by then the new mum has run out of vases anyway), once the first round of new baby flowers has faded. For the card: “Welcome, little one. Can't wait to meet you.”

Anna, on a room with a newborn in it

Nothing heavily scented, nothing that drops pollen, nothing that needs a vase. A newborn's room is usually small and kept warm, and scent builds up in warm, still air until it fills the place. The Blush Pinks Arrangement With Chocolates is set in its own foam, and a glass of water every couple of days keeps it going.

You've got the funeral notice open and you're working out where flowers actually go. Gungahlin Cemetery is Canberra's biggest, and a service there could be in the Memorial Hall, at the crematorium or at the graveside, so the notes need the name of the person who has died, the service time and which one. I learned that the hard way in 2007, driving a white sheath from our Marine Parade shop up to Allambe at Nerang with nothing on the docket but “Allambe, 11am” (my handwriting, my docket, so no one else to blame). There were two services at eleven, and I stood at the back of the wrong one, holding a sheath for a family I'd never met, until a man in a dark suit read the card over my shoulder and walked me across the lawn to the right one. I still go red thinking about it.

If the family is Hindu, sympathy flowers for home after the cremation are usually the better choice, because the family looks after the flowers at the service themselves. That's something I learned on the phones from people who knew far more about it than I did. A card line, if you need one: “Thinking of you all. With love.”

A wreath lies flat on a lawn grave where a tall vase tips in the first gust, so for funeral flowers at a graveside, the Wreath With White & Purple Tones is the one.

Not every send has a heading: a friend who has just moved into a flat near the light rail, a thank-you to a Gungahlin College teacher, someone you haven't rung in too long. That's what just-because flowers are for.

Anna has a view on this one. In a new flat the vase is still in a box somewhere, so send something that brings its own water. The Blissful Botanics Arrangement can go on a bench among the moving boxes and get on with it, and nobody has to find scissors.