Order Flowers to Clarence, Houses, Wards and Front Desks

You probably found out by text, from someone who assumed you already knew. Funeral rooms or the family home, and the sorting is the only hard part: wreaths and sheaths to the director with the name of the person who died and the service date, condolences to the house any day that week. Our florists find the rooms want tributes in by the day before.

Flowers do not cover what happened and you know that. They mark that someone a long way off stopped and did something. The card outlasts them by years, so keep it short: "Thinking of you and your family" has never once been wrong. If the family is Aboriginal, ask first and take whatever they say as the answer.

White is the convention and it holds up, which is the only reason I push it. Chrysanthemum runs three weeks and does not mind a cold van, where a rose sulks. In July, down the hill, that difference is the whole thing.

The house on the ridge got sold, or got to be too much, and now there is a bed, a chair and a windowsill. Thinking-of-you flowers go to the front desk, and from what our florists see it gets logged before the trolley round. "No news, just thinking of you" reads better in a shared room than anything longer.

A box turns up already in water. A wrapped bunch waits in its cellophane until someone finds a vase, and in a two-bed room no one has a spare. Small, low-scent, in something that will not tip. With dementia, familiar does more work than exotic and non-toxic beats both: roses, daisies, lavender. Nothing off a bulb, because bulbs get eaten and vase water gets drunk.

You cannot get to the table, so the flowers go and sit in your chair until you can. The catch out here is the roster. The orders that come back unfinished are nearly all one picture: a two o'clock knock at a house on nights, no neighbour thirty seconds away to take it in. Authority to leave and a mobile number at checkout fixes it. A 70th is worth twenty seconds of typing.

Anna, qualified florist

A porch at that height is a better place to leave flowers than almost any doorstep in the state, right up until a clear winter night. Woody stems, not soft ones, if it might sit out there. And send something with size to it. Seventy years earns more than six stems.

None of the three matched, or you cannot pick. That is most people. Tell us at checkout whether it is a house, a ward, a front desk or funeral rooms, and let the florist build to it. Anna would far sooner that than watch you agonise.

If it were my call I would send the Australian Natives Bunch. Australian-grown, most of it off the coast, it stands a fortnight untouched, and it does not announce a funeral or a birthday, which is exactly the problem you walked in with.