Nothing you send fixes what has happened. Everybody ordering flowers for a funeral knows that and orders them anyway, because they get put somewhere the family walks past. That is the job. The family is already fielding phone calls, a celebrant's schedule and somebody asking about sandwiches, and you want yours to arrive without adding a line to that list.

Sort it first, because there are three destinations here and they are not interchangeable. Service flowers go to the funeral home and need the date, the surname the service is booked under, and about an hour's clearance before it starts. Condolence flowers go to the house, and the three days after the death are the usual window rather than the day itself. Graveside is the third and it comes up more than people expect, because Southport Lawn Cemetery on Melia Court is the memorial park for this end of the coast and plenty of families go on a cycle rather than only on anniversaries.

Integrity Funerals on Tonga Place at Parkwood is a couple of minutes from most Arundel addresses and the partner florist near Arundel runs that corridor regularly, so a morning service is workable if the order is in the day before. Saturday services are common and our Saturday cutoff is 10am, which in practice means a Saturday morning service wants the order in on the Friday. If the family has asked for a wreath or a sheath rather than a bunch, say so at the point of order rather than after, because those are built to a different frame and a different clock.

One thing that is specific to this suburb. With the mosque on Allied Drive drawing families from right across the region, there is a real chance the family you are sending to is Muslim. Ask first, before anything is ordered, and if the answer is yes it goes to the home after the funeral and never to the mosque itself. Practice varies enormously between families and there is no safe default, and burial is usually inside twenty four hours, so if the answer is yes the window is short. If the answer is no, the answer is no, and a donation in the person's name or food to the house afterwards does the same job. We would rather tell you that than sell you flowers nobody wanted. On the card, short is better. "Thinking of you all" is enough.

Anna, qualified florist

Most people reach for white and stop there, and white is right more often than not, but it is the texture that decides whether a tribute holds up through a service and then a week on a sideboard. Chrysanthemums will give you ten to fourteen days even in a summer up here and carnations are not far behind. Lisianthus is prettier than both and gives you six or seven, so know what you are trading. Roses at a chapel are lovely for four hours and tired by the wake. If there is a casket spray involved, tell the florist the service time rather than the delivery time, because they build backwards from it.

One more that catches people out, and it catches them in the wrong direction. White and yellow chrysanthemums are the right flower at a Chinese funeral and the wrong flower at a Chinese birthday. Same stem, opposite meaning, and the mistake only ever runs one way. This suburb has enough Chinese, Japanese and Korean households for that to be a live risk rather than a theoretical one, so if you know the family and the occasion is a happy one, put it in the notes and the florist will build around them. Red is the other one to leave alone at any East Asian funeral. Early April is worth knowing too. Qingming brings families out to the graves and the white and yellow chrysanthemum bunches go out by the armful that fortnight.

You do not need to know the diagnosis to send something. The gesture works either way, and half the people ordering to Gold Coast University Hospital have only been told somebody went in on Tuesday.

What you do need is the full name and the ward, and it is worth waiting until they are actually on a ward rather than ordering while they are still in a procedure. From what our florists have seen, the chain runs reception, ward clerk, bedside, and it takes anywhere from half an hour to three hours depending on the round. The other trap is the short stay wards, where a day one delivery can arrive after the discharge. If the stay is likely to be brief, send get well flowers to the house instead and they will be there when they get home. Hospital flowers are built for this and the format is the point.

Skip the lilies and skip the scent. Oncology, haematology, transplant and intensive care will generally not take cut flowers at all, and the general wards that do take them do not want pollen transferring onto staff uniforms. Box or vase, never hand tied. There is no spare vase on a ward and there never has been. Under about thirty centimetres tall so it fits the overbed table without owning it. Gerberas, carnations and unscented roses are the safest things you can put in a ward. And no potted plants anywhere in a hospital, because the soil carries bacteria and fungal spores that cut flowers do not. One correction worth making, because it costs people a good option. Peace lilies and orchids are not lilies. Different genus entirely, no loose pollen, no perfume. When I say skip the lilies I mean the Orientals and the Asiatics with the stamens loaded up, not an orchid.

There is also research on this, which surprised me when I first read it. A randomised trial of ninety surgical patients found the ones recovering in rooms with flowers used fewer painkillers and had lower blood pressure, and ninety three per cent said they would choose the same room again against seventy three per cent without. So when somebody tells you flowers are only a gesture, they are wrong on the evidence. "Thinking of you, hope you are on the mend" does more work on a card than anything longer.

The visits have got further apart than they used to be. Everyone in the family has noticed and nobody has said it out loud. She is turning eighty something and she still has opinions about flowers, and the room she is in now is a good deal smaller than the room she formed those opinions in.

Deliveries to St Vincent's Care and BlueCare Woodlands Lodge both go through reception rather than straight to the room, so the full name on the order does more work than the street number, and the room or unit number does more still. Hopewell Hospice is eight beds, which means the staff there know every resident by name and a delivery gets walked in personally. Put a phone number in the notes as well. If the resident has moved rooms or gone out to an appointment, that is the difference between a redelivery and a phone call. Seventieth and eightieth birthday flowers are the most common order we see into those three addresses, well ahead of sympathy, and most of them come from an adult child who is not in Queensland. Birthday flowers for Mum is where most of those orders start.

If there is dementia in the picture, one more thing. She may not hold on to who sent them, or that anybody did. Send them anyway. The room is different for a week whether the name sticks or not, and the staff will tell her every time they walk past.

Bedside tables in these rooms are about the size of a dinner plate once the water jug and the glasses are on them, so anything over about forty centimetres wide becomes a nuisance to the staff and gets moved to a windowsill where nobody can see it. In a memory support unit, colour does more work than size. Strong saturated tones read at distance and through cataracts, while pale apricot and soft cream disappear into the wall behind them. The flowers somebody grew up with get recognised on sight. An anthurium gets studied.

One thing about the hospice that people hesitate over and should not. Palliative wards are where flowers matter most of all. The staff there understand exactly what a delivery means and they make room for it. Send them.

Whatever you send, it wants to be something that does not tip. People move unpredictably in a memory unit and a tall vase on a bedside table is a matter of time. If you want the delivery to read as considered rather than default, a cymbidium orchid does that better than anything else near the price. Eight to fourteen days in this climate, no scent worth mentioning, and it holds its shape on a bedside table long after a mixed bunch has gone over.

They are buried in visitors and running on about four hours of sleep. Anything arriving in that house has to earn the bench space it takes up. Sending flowers to a new baby is a happy thing to do and it is also a way of measuring how far away you are. Both at once.

Half these streets went up in the last twenty years and the older pocket near Napper Road is still the original brick and tile, but the delivery pattern is the same either way. The estate side of Arundel is nearly all separate houses with a porch and a driveway, which makes it one of the easier delivery patterns on this part of the coast. No intercoms, no concierge, no building manager. If nobody is home the florist finds the most sheltered spot out of the sun and it waits there, and in summer that is the argument for a morning run rather than an afternoon one. Napper Road backs up around school pick up, so an order in early beats an order in at 1.55pm. New baby flowers here mostly go to the house rather than the hospital, because by the time the visitors thin out everybody is home anyway.

Anna would push back on the big bunch for a house with a newborn in it.

A tall vase on a bench in a house with a new baby is one more thing to move, top up and knock over. A low arrangement holds its own water for a week, sits on a table nobody is using, and does not need trimming on day four. If you want the gesture to be bigger, go up in stem quality rather than in height. Two dozen good carnations in a low box will be remembered longer than a metre of gladioli that ends up on top of the fridge. Not tulips. People ask for tulips constantly up here and they are gone by day three once this humidity finds them.

One warning that comes with the carnations, and nobody ever thinks of it. Carnations cannot be near fruit. Ripening bananas throw off ethylene and carnations are about as sensitive to it as a flower gets, so a bowl on the same bench will curl the petals inside a day. Kitchen bench with fruit on it, no. Dining table in the next room, yes. Same flower, two completely different weeks.

A lot of what comes into this suburb does not fit any of the four above. Somebody had a scan. Somebody moved their mother in and has not slept properly since. You do not need to name the occasion to send flowers, and you do not need to work out which category the website wants.

This is the one case where I would hand it over rather than pick it yourself. Florist's Choice means the florist builds from whatever came in strongest that morning, which in practice is better stock than you get by choosing a photo taken last spring. Worth saying plainly, because the whole industry does it: the photo on any flower website is generally the premium size, shot on a good day, in a studio. What a florist builds is what came in strongest that morning at the price you paid. Sometimes that beats the photo. It is always fresher than the photo. Put the situation in the notes rather than a product name. Aged care, shared room, no scent. New baby, low box. Somebody having a rough week, make it bright. A florist who knows this suburb will read that in two seconds and get it right.