The birthday is today, and the house is up a drive you have only ever seen on a map. Send the birthday flowers to the house, and put the number, a line about the drive and a dry spot in the notes in case nobody is in. Our best-selling birthday flowers are a safe start if you are guessing at their taste.

I learned why the dry spot matters in February 2008, on a birthday run from our Marine Parade shop to a farmhouse in the hills above Stokers Siding. Rain coming in sideways, nobody home, and no verandah I could see from the car. I stood at the back door for ten minutes choosing between the woodpile and the dog kennel. The dog was in the kennel. The flowers went on the woodpile under a feed bag, with a note, and the lady rang the shop the next morning to say the feed bag was a nice touch. Crohamhurst gets that kind of rain too, so tell the florist where it can stay dry.

Anna's call: a bunch that has waited out in the weather has been out of water a while, so recut the stems at about forty-five degrees before they go in. An angled end cannot sit flat and seal itself against the bottom of the vase.

You have the service details, and you will not make it to the graveside. The burial is at Peachester Cemetery, the old bush cemetery on Cemetery Road inside Crohamhurst itself. There is no staffed office at the gate, so funeral flowers travel with the funeral director: their name and the service time go in the notes. A sheaf from our wreaths and sheaths lies flat on the grave. For the family themselves, sympathy flowers to the house a day or two after the service often mean more, once the visitors thin out. The card can stay short: "Thinking of you all."

Anna, on colour against the bush

Against the bush around that cemetery, white and cream read clearly from the back of a crowd. For most families they are the right call.

They are off their feet, and you are not sure whether they are home yet. For Maleny Soldiers Memorial Hospital on Bean Street, put the ward and their full name in the notes; in our experience hospital flowers go to the ward desk and the nurses take them in. If they are already home, get well flowers go to the house, and a mobile in the notes gives them a minute to get to the door. For the card: "Rest up. Thinking of you."

A boxed arrangement suits both. The box is the vase, the stems sit in wet foam, and nobody on a ward has a spare vase anyway. A squirt of water into the foam from a sports bottle every couple of days keeps it going.

A lot of orders have no heading at all: a new job, a fence finally fixed, a hello after too long. Anna has a view on this one.

Natives. Protea and leucadendron carry tough, leathery bracts that damp air barely touches, so grey mould hardly gets a look in. And when the vase is done, a banksia cone or a leucadendron head dries on a shelf and stays for months.