Same Day Flowers to Cooks Hill, Front Door or Intercom

It's their birthday and they're rostered on, because hospitality rosters don't check the calendar. Send the flowers to work, with the café or shop name and their name in the notes, and they go to the counter.

I learned how that goes back in Kingscliff in 2007, walking a birthday bunch into Choux Box on Marine Parade in the middle of the breakfast rush. The girl it was for had a plate in each hand, so I stood by the coffee machine holding the flowers until she was free, and by then half the café knew whose birthday it was. She loved it. A Darby Street café at lunchtime is no different. For a mate, there are birthday flowers for a friend and birthday flowers for him.

Anna's pick: the Bright Arrangement With Chocolates is built into wet foam, so it keeps drinking on a busy counter until there's a free hand to carry it home.

The notice has come through with the service details. For a funeral at St John's, the heritage-listed church on the corner of Darby and Parry Streets, or at Sacred Heart Cathedral on Hunter Street, put the service time and the funeral director's name in the notes. For a morning service, order the day before: same-day flowers go out through the day, and in our experience the funeral director wants them in place before anyone arrives. Sympathy flowers sent to the family home in the days after are often the ones that get kept.

Flowers are a small thing next to what's happened, and they're still what people remember. On the card, "Thinking of you all" is enough.

Anna, on lilies in a house full of visitors

Keep sympathy lilies away from the fruit basket somebody dropped round, or the young buds fall before they open. In another room they open one after another for a week or more.

Dinner's booked on Darby Street and you want the flowers to land before you sit down. At work they arrive in front of everyone, which some people love and others find mortifying. At home they're waiting when your person walks in, as long as the notes say where to leave them. Andrew still agonises over work or home every anniversary, for the record. Start with anniversary flowers, or love and romance flowers for no particular date.

Red roses on a desk get looked at by twenty people before home time, and at home by one, which is sometimes the point. For the desk, 3 Wrapped Red Roses. If the outer petals look a bit bruised when they land, those are guard petals, there to protect the bloom on the way over. Pull them off and the rose underneath is fresh.

Plenty of orders don't fit a heading: a rough week, keys to a new rental, a thank-you that's a month overdue. You don't need a reason for just because flowers. Anna has an arrangement in mind.

The Blush Pinks Arrangement With Chocolates comes in its own low container with wet foam inside, so nobody hunts for a vase, and it fits a hall table. The lilies in it are Asiatics, with barely any scent, which suits a small room. Lilies still mind the fruit bowl, so the hall table it is.