Flowers Delivered to East Mackay Before the Family Walks In

Someone has died and you are sorting flowers from a city that is not this one. They will not touch the size of it and you already know that. They go anyway, because the alternative is nothing arriving from you at all. The first decision is not what to send. It is which address. White sympathy flowers to the home in the first three days say we know, we are sorry, we are not asking you to do anything. Funeral flowers to the chapel do the same thing in public.

If the service is on Shakespeare Street, put the date, the start time and the family surname on the order. Our partner florist in or close to East Mackay plans that drop backwards from the service, which usually means the flowers are inside and placed while the room is still empty. Say whether you want it at the altar or with the family seating, because from what our florists have seen, staff place it better when the intent is written down.

One death in a circle of friends and workmates will often produce three to eight separate orders inside forty-eight hours, most of them landing at the same chapel on the same morning. Yours is not arriving on its own and it does not have to outdo the rest of them. Nobody at a service is pricing the flowers, whatever the part of you that is worrying about it says. A modest sheaf with the right name on the card does the same work as a large one, and if you have the budget it is better spent on a second order to the house than on making the chapel piece bigger. Family-name-plus-one-line is the right register on the card. "Thinking of the [surname] family" is enough, and if it is a workplace collection then "With deepest sympathy from the team at [company]" is the whole thing. The card gets kept long after the flowers are gone.

Anna, on what survives the day

Taste is not really the question here. Read the room. A white sheaf is right at a traditional service and can look stiff at a celebration of life where the family has asked for the colours she actually liked, so find out which kind of service it is before you pick. If nobody can tell you, white works in either room. Lily buds are good for a stand piece, because they open across the week and give the family something changing to look at once it is home. Wards are the opposite case, for a reason I will come to.

She is eighty-something, she lives in a townhouse off Goldsmith or Macalister Street, she is on her own most of the day, and you are in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane. Most orders into these streets have no date attached to them. They go on a Tuesday, because you have not rung in a fortnight and the not-ringing finally caught up with you. Thinking of you flowers exist for exactly that. If it happens to be the actual day, 80th birthday flowers is the shelf to start on.

Some of these orders go to someone who will not reliably know who they came from. If that is yours, the flowers may end up meaning more to you than to her. Which is all right. Send them anyway.

A quarter of the dwellings in this suburb are townhouses, better than double the Queensland share on the last census, and that changes the delivery more than the flowers do. The number on the post is the driveway. Give us the unit number plus a door colour or a "second from the left", because bin enclosures read as front entries from the street. Tell us if she is hard of hearing and the driver knocks harder and waits longer. Mid-morning is the realistic earliest window on those runs. The van is loaded by nine. The run order is not.

She will register the colour and the size from the hallway, before she has picked out a single flower. Whatever she says on the phone afterwards will be about the colour. Which raises a question Anna gets asked more than any other on these orders: who changes the water?

Nobody, usually, which is the honest answer for a recipient living alone and the reason I steer these toward a boxed arrangement over a hand-tied bunch more often than people expect. A box arrives with its own reservoir and needs a splash of water every couple of days instead of a full vase change. Ask for it low and wide rather than tall, so it sits on a side table without being moved, because the ones that get moved are the ones that get knocked. Flowers under $60 covers most of what suits that room.

Your person is across the Forgan Bridge at the base hospital on Bridge Road. The address is technically West Mackay and the East Mackay run crosses the bridge most days, so our florist treats it as one zone. What matters is when. Flowers sent while somebody is still in emergency, or still coming out of surgery, have nowhere to land. They sit at the front desk because nobody can yet say which bed that person is in. The wait is the useful part.

You may also not know how bad it is. A lot of what crosses that bridge is sent by someone who has been given a ward number and nothing else. Bright if the news is good, softer if you are not sure, and either one is a reasonable thing to send when you cannot ask the question. These flowers are a celebration or they are a way of standing in the room when you cannot stand in it, and quite often you will not know which one you have sent until afterwards.

Thirty-seven degrees, nowhere to park anywhere near the entrance, a baby screaming in the back seat and five minutes to get a bunch to a reception desk and back out to the car. I used to do this run myself, back home, before there was a network. So when I say the flowers stop at reception and the rest belongs to somebody else's shift, I am not guessing at it. Put the patient's full name and the ward on the order. If you do not have the ward, ring the switchboard with the name first, and in our experience they will point you to it. Without it the bunch sits at the front desk and nobody knows whose it is. If they are discharged before it lands, ring us instead of assuming the hospital forwards it. We can usually pull it back and re-route it to the house while it is still on the van. Hospital flowers is the shelf built for this.

Do not send a wrapped bunch to a ward. It looks generous and it creates a job. Somebody has to find a container the ward does not keep. Then unwrap, cut, fill. It is nobody's job, so it waits. A box or a vase arrangement turns up carrying its own water and goes straight onto the bedside table. Keep it low and front-facing so it fits beside the medical gear. And skip lilies, which is the opposite of what I said about a chapel stand piece, for a different reason: the pollen sits out on the stamens and travels. It moves between rooms on staff clothing. The person in the next bed is quietly part of your decision. Peace lilies and orchids are a different genus and are not the problem at all. Roses, gerberas, carnations and chrysanthemums are all safe.

Park and Mattson ran a controlled trial on this in 2008, ninety surgical patients, flowers in half the recovery rooms and none in the other half. The patients in the rooms with flowers used fewer painkillers and recorded lower blood pressure and heart rate, and ninety-three per cent said they would choose that room again against seventy-three per cent in the rooms without.

Common, and fine. If you cannot tell whether what you are sending counts as sympathy or just thinking of you, that is not a failure on your part, and it does not change the flowers. Pick the address first and the category sorts itself out. If you would rather not read on, the bestsellers at the top of this page are what move most often into this suburb, and any of them will be right. Nobody expects you to know this. My first ever flower call, I put the customer on hold and went and asked my wife, who at that point had been on the phones about a year and knew roughly as much about flowers as I did. We got through it. A lot of what goes into this suburb has no occasion name on it: a first anniversary of a death, a woman just home from a fortnight in hospital, a neighbour who has been doing somebody else's mother's shopping run for two years.

For a brief that wide, most people reach for roses, because roses feel like the safe answer. Ask instead for a mixed hand-tied built around disbud chrysanthemums or dianthus with a few feature stems through it, and let the florist choose the feature from whatever came in strongest that morning. Same money, roughly twice the standing time, and you have not committed to a colour story you were guessing at. If you would rather hand the whole thing over, florist's choice does exactly that. Prefer to talk it through? Ring 1300 360 469 and somebody will take the order on the phone.