Currumbin Valley Flower Delivery, Same Day

The birthday is today, the house is on acreage, and all you have is a number off a letterbox. Add one line to the notes: the gate colour, the shed, how far past the Currumbin Rock Pools. In 2007 I spent twenty minutes up the wrong driveway near those rock pools, with Asha only months old in the back, until a man on a quad bike led me to the right house (Asha slept through the whole thing, of course). I have asked for directions ever since. Well, nearly always. Order birthday flowers before 2pm and they're on today's run, and if it's for your mum, our birthday flowers for Mum lean towards softer colours.

If nobody's home, a hand-tied bunch waits happily in its wrap on a shaded verandah for a few hours. Get it into water that afternoon and cut the stems on an angle first, because a flat cut seals against the bottom of the vase and the stem can't drink.

Someone has gone in for surgery and you have a hospital name and not much else. From the valley that's often John Flynn Private at Tugun, and Andrew and I carried flowers through its doors more times than I can count back in 2007 and 2008 (and got lost in its corridors more than once). On those runs, the full name and ward number did more work than anything else on the order. Discharged already? Send the get well flowers to the house. On the card, something simple: "Thinking of you, and hoping you're home soon." If it's a new hip rather than anything worse: "Get well soon. The chooks are fine."

Anna's pick: 3 Gerberas In A Vase. They're bright and unscented, and they arrive in their own vase, which matters because in my experience a ward rarely has a spare one. Oriental lilies are glorious at home, where their scent can fill a room; on a shared ward, go unscented.

The notice has come through and the service is this week. It might be in the little Uniting Church on Currumbin Creek Road, which opened in 1927, or at a venue arranged by a funeral director such as Heritage Brothers at Burleigh Heads. Order funeral flowers with the venue and start time in the notes, or send sympathy flowers to the house a few days on, once the visitors thin out. Flowers won't make any of it better, I know that, and still the family will remember, years from now, whose card sat on which arrangement. On the card: "Thinking of you all today."

Anna, on a service in a small church

A sheath lies flat on the coffin, so there's no stand to knock over in a small church. Whites and soft greens sit quietly in a room that size.

Plenty of valley orders fit no heading: a new neighbour, a thank you for minding the dog. This is where Anna gets decisive.

Go for the Australian Native Arrangement, from the native flowers range. Woody native stems shrug off damp air, and once the flowers have had their run, any banksia cones or leucadendron in it dry where they stand and sit on a shelf for months.