Cordeaux Heights Flower Delivery, Same Day to Every Crescent

The birthday is at a house in Cordeaux Heights and you're in Brisbane, or stuck at work across town. A 60th birthday bunch or a 50th ordered before the cutoff goes the same day. Get the address right: these streets were planned in 1979 as crescents and cul-de-sacs, so add a landmark, like the colour of the garage. I learned why in 2007 in Terranora, behind Banora Point, with a birthday bunch on the passenger seat, a street directory on my knee and a crescent that bent back on itself. I passed the same letterbox three times. The house was on the other leg.

Worth passing on to them: recut the stems on an angle the minute the bunch is unwrapped. A flat cut sits on the floor of the vase and seals off, so the stems can't drink and the heads droop days early.

Mum moved into care, or Dad's in the village and you ring him on Sundays. Two places on Waples Road, just over the line in Unanderra, share a name: Uniting Farmborough Grove at 66, the units and villas, and Uniting Farmborough at 91, the aged care home. At the care home, in our experience, flowers go to reception and staff carry them through, so the resident's full name and room number are what get them there. At the village, the unit number does that job. Name and number matter as much for an 80th birthday as for a plain hello. A card line: "Thinking of you. Talk Sunday."

Anna, on a care-home room

Send an arrangement over a wrapped bunch. It arrives sitting in its own water, so nobody has to hunt for a vase. A wrapped bunch is lovely once it's in water, and in a care room that can take a while.

A notice in the Illawarra Mercury, a service at Wollongong Memorial Gardens on Berkeley Road, and you can't be there. Our wreaths and sheaths go through the funeral director running the service, so name the director and the chapel in the notes. Or send sympathy flowers for home in the quieter week after. A wreath is a small thing to send from a long way off. It's also the one thing of yours in the chapel. A card line: "So sorry. Thinking of you all."

Anna's call: whites and soft greens sit quietly in a chapel. Check the family's tradition first, though; white isn't the right colour in every faith.

Plenty of orders come with no brief: a thank-you to the neighbour who fed the cat, a new job, a just because. Anna has a pick for those.

My pick is the Blue Mist Arrangement. White roses and blue delphinium, set in its own water, calm on a Jarrah Crescent kitchen bench or a care-room shelf on Waples Road. Keep it a room away from the fruit bowl, though, because delphinium drops its florets beside ripening bananas.