Same Day Flower Delivery to Corrimal, House, Ward or Villa

You remembered, it's today, and you're a long way off. I took enough last-minute birthday calls between 2006 and 2011 to know you're far from the first. Send it to the house if someone's in, or to her work, if you know where that is these days, and add a mobile so whoever delivers it can ring rather than leave it on a sunny step. If she's your mum, our birthday flowers for Mum are the usual pick.

Anna's call: if you pick the Gerbera Bunch with the teddy and balloon, those stems are hollow and clog fast. Clean water every second day, and if a head bows, recut two centimetres and stand it in shallow warm water for an hour.

Someone has rung with a date and a time. The Mass might be at St Columbkille's on the Princes Highway, or the service might be with White Lady Funerals at Bulli, or H. Parsons. Put the funeral director and the service time in the order notes, and a florist in or close to Corrimal works to that window. For the service itself, our funeral flowers include sheaths and wreaths, and our sympathy flowers for the home suit the house a few days on. Flowers don't fix any of it. The family still notices who sent them.

Card idea: "Thinking of you all today, and in the weeks after."

Whites and soft greens sit quietly at the front of a church. A sheath lies flat along a coffin lid; a vase on that curved, polished timber is one bump from going over.

She's in Bulli Hospital on Hospital Road, or Wollongong Hospital on Loftus Street, and the ward number came second-hand. In 2007 Andrew and I carried gerberas into Murwillumbah Hospital ourselves, only to be told she'd gone home that morning, to a farm out past Uki. We found it. Eventually. So add her home address as a back-up. Our get well flowers or hospital flowers both suit a bedside.

Card idea: "Rest up. The garden can wait."

Anna, on a shared room

Chrysanthemums suit a shared ward best: bright, no scent for the next bed to put up with, and they forgive water nobody gets round to changing. Gerberas are scent-free too, if someone can top them up. Save the lilies for when she's home.

You know the person. The flowers are another matter. Anna has a view on this.

Go with the Florist's Choice. A florist given a free hand works from the best of what came in that morning, and puts the dark colours low and the pale ones high, which is why a good one looks settled on a table the minute it is unwrapped.