Flowers Delivered to Culburra Beach, Not Always a House

Flowers will not fix it. You know that already. What they do is sit in a room you cannot get to this week and say your name out loud in it.

There are three places they can go here and they are not interchangeable. The room at the aged care centre on Culburra Road, and if the person is still with us that is a thinking of you order rather than a sympathy one, which is worth getting right before you write the card. The family home, which is what sympathy flowers for the home are built for. Or the service.

The director is almost certainly in Nowra, because there is no funeral director in Culburra Beach. Turner Family Funerals on Worrigee Street and H. Parsons on North Street handle most of what comes out of this town. Where the service actually happens is a separate question, and it catches people out. It might be a chapel in Nowra. It might be St John's Anglican or Our Lady Help of Christians here in town, since this suburb splits almost evenly between the two. H. Parsons also runs the chapel out at Wandandian, another half hour south on the Princes Highway. Ask which one before you order. Flowers sent to a Nowra chapel while the family is gathering at Wandandian are flowers that miss it.

For the room, our florists tell us the same thing every time. It goes to reception, it gets logged, and a staff member walks it through, usually within a few hours depending on what the shift is doing. For a service the timing belongs to the funeral director, so we ask for the director's name and the florist rings them before anything is loaded.

Then the card, which is the bit most people get stuck on. Write it like it will outlast the flowers, because it will. The bunch is gone inside a fortnight. The card ends up in a drawer, or taped inside a wardrobe door, and people keep them for years. "There are no right words. Thinking of you and your family" is enough. What gets kept is the sentence.

Anna has a rule about what goes in a room like that.

Whites, creams and a muted green. Bright is not disrespectful. The trouble is that a small room amplifies whatever you put in it, and colour is volume. Keep it low and keep it small. The exception worth naming is a secular celebration of life, and there are a lot of those on this coast now. Those families often want the opposite of restraint, and native sympathy flowers carry that better than a white sheaf ever will. And if the family is Aboriginal, ask them what they would like before you order anything. Every community is different and there is no default to fall back on. Where flowers are welcome, natives carry a meaning an imported rose cannot, because they connect the person back to Country. Wattle, banksia, kangaroo paw. The banksia grows on this headland.

You are not going to be at the table. Somebody will hold the phone up at some point and you will get eleven seconds of a room you would rather be standing in.

The club on the corner of West Crescent does the christenings, the wakes and the eightieths for this town, because there is not much else with a function room in it. It changes where the flowers should go. Send them to the house that morning, not to the club during the lunch, because a bunch that arrives mid-function gets parked on a trestle table behind the urn and nobody sees it again. If the birthday is at the care centre instead, the room rules further up this page apply, and small beats big. Eightieth birthday flowers and birthday flowers for mum both work here, and the difference between them is mostly who is going to read the card first.

Anna on the two shapes

A hand-tied bunch and a low arrangement do different jobs on a day like that. The bunch photographs better, and if there is a function it will end up in whatever vase somebody can find, usually too tall, usually in a draught, and usually cut flat so the stem seals against the bottom of the vase and stops drinking. The container version arrives finished. Nobody hunts for scissors, nobody cuts the stems too short, and it survives the trip home in the back of a car at the end of the afternoon, which the bunch generally does not. If it is going to move house once during the day, send the container.

And on an eightieth, longevity is the point. The family arrives and the family leaves. What is still standing in that room on the Thursday is the thing she actually lives with, which is why the chrysanthemum in a mixed bunch is doing more work than the rose beside it. If you want them in the house before anyone turns up, order the day before and ask for a morning drop in the notes.

More people in this town work in aged care than in any other single industry, which means the person who rang you at ten at night probably also lives four streets from the home. A small town doing a hard job on top of itself.

Two versions of this order come through. One is for a team, and that goes to the nurses' station or reception, where it has to survive a week of nobody being responsible for it. The other is for one person by name, and that is better sent to reception with the name on the card and left to find its way. Thank you flowers after a stay, or after a death, land differently from birthday flowers, and they are still worth sending a fortnight afterwards. A fortnight afterwards is fine. Nobody is counting.

On size, because this is the one people agonise over: the gesture beats the spend every time. Something mid-range that is still alive in a fortnight reads better than something twice the price that is finished by Friday. And if the card is the hard part, "Thank you for looking after her. It meant more than we could say" covers it.

On a station desk, neglect is what kills a bunch. Heat barely gets a look in. Chrysanthemums and carnations will go a fortnight with the water changed once, and neither of them minds a heater running or a vent blowing on them, which is what actually kills a bunch in a building like that. Timing helps too. Spring is the honest window on this coast, roughly September through November, when the wattle and the flannel flower and the banksia on the headland are all going at once. None of which means your stems were picked at Culburra Beach, and I am not going to pretend it does. What is true is that natives are one of the few things in a florist's bucket that did not cross an ocean to get there. Most of the roses and a fair share of the carnations sold in this country are imported. Banksia, waratah, kangaroo paw and flannel flower are almost all grown here. So a spring native bunch is doing more for the money than the same order placed in February, and it has had a shorter trip to do it.

Start with the one that has no name. Somebody is driving down for the school holidays, or for Easter, and the house has been closed since autumn. Flowers on the bench when they walk in is a genuinely lovely idea, and the only difficult part is the clock, because you know the day they are arriving and not the hour. So give us the day and say so in the notes. The florist would rather hold it for a confirmed arrival than leave it on a step outside a house that has been shut up in the heat since March.

The rest have no category either. Someone had a fall. Someone finally sold the place. Someone has been quiet for a month and you would like them to know you noticed. You do not need to name it to send it.

I would not send hydrangeas to a house nobody is checking on. They drink more than anything else on the bench and they are the first thing to go in heat. Perfect at ten in the morning, finished by four, and there is nobody in the house to top the water up. Tulips and sweet peas are the same story over summer. Chrysanthemums, carnations, banksia and leucadendron forgive an empty house, which is the whole trick here. Protea will not, whatever it looks like. It drinks harder than almost anything on the bench and it can empty a vase inside a few days.

And send it in a container rather than as a bunch in paper. It is the one recommendation that holds across every address in this postcode, and that is unusual. On a reception desk it needs no vase and nobody has to take responsibility for it. In a house that has just been opened it is already in water when it arrives. On a bedside table it cannot be knocked over. A wrapped bunch is the nicer object in the hand and the worse object in every one of those three rooms. Flower arrangements start at the same place a bunch does, and there is a decent run of flowers under $60 if the budget is the bit you have been quietly worrying about. And if you have read this far and still cannot pick, ring 1300 360 469. Two minutes on the phone beats twenty on a website.