Flowers to Eglinton, Where Six in Ten Houses Have Four Bedrooms

They have not stopped feeling sick about the number yet. Whatever they say at the door, three weeks into a house that size, some part of them is still doing arithmetic at two in the morning.

In 2006 we paid a Kingscliff accountant for advice about buying a flower shop and the advice came back in three words. Don't buy it. We bought it anyway. They are still our accountant nineteen years later, which means either we were right or they are an extraordinarily patient firm. So I know the fortnight after you sign for something enormous, and it is not a fortnight where you want a gift to land badly. Forty-seven percent of Eglinton is paying off a mortgage and thirty-one percent own outright, which makes it the most heavily mortgaged suburb around Bathurst, and the streets on the western edge are still being subdivided.

Which changes what a housewarming gift is doing. Nothing in that house is scuffed yet. The carpet has never had anything spilt on it, the sofa arrived in plastic, and the person who chose the benchtop can tell you the name of the stone. Our florists have delivered enough into new estates to know the gift lands in a room where every surface is still a surprise to its owner. Natives are the safe instinct here and they are a good one, and the reason is mechanical before it is anything else.

Not oriental lilies. Not into a house this new. I know why people reach for them. They are tall and showy, one stem will scent a whole house, and in a big empty new place that is exactly the brief. The part the sender never hears about is what happens next. Oriental lily pollen is rust-orange and it is not a stain in the ordinary sense, it bonds. Dry pollen goes into fabric fibre and it does not come out. Water will not shift it and a cloth makes it worse, because wiping drives it in. A good florist strips the anthers before it leaves the shop. But a lily arrives with buds shut, and on day three another one opens in a room nobody is watching, loaded, over a sofa that came out of its plastic last month. If you want the lily look in a new house, pollen-free Asiatics are the call. Same shape, no anthers to shed, and no perfume either, which some people count as a loss and some count as the point.

The first baby got flowers from everyone who had ever met the parents. The second one gets a card, if that. The mother notices both times and says nothing either time.

Nearly a quarter of Eglinton is under fifteen and four in ten households are minding somebody through the day, the highest rate of any suburb around Bathurst, so plenty of those houses are on their second or their third right now. She is not going to say anything about it. She is more tired than she was the first time and she has a toddler as well now, so a delivery that needs her to find scissors and a vase and forty seconds of attention is a gift with a job attached to it. New baby flowers to a second-time house should ask her for nothing. If she has a birthday inside the next few months, our florists will tell you the same thing: birthday flowers with her name on them are the ones that get talked about, because everything else in that house has the baby's name on it.

The card is the part nobody warns you about. Congratulations on your new arrival is the line the first baby got, on every card in the room. Write to her this time. The baby cannot read. Two of them now, thinking of you. Or just: second one, you have got this.

Anna sorted first-baby orders and second-baby orders completely differently.

A first-baby bunch is for looking at. Everyone is coming through the house, it needs to be pretty on Tuesday, and if it is done by the following weekend nobody minds. A second-baby bunch gets ignored and it has to be fine with that. It goes down somewhere and stays there. Water unchanged, nobody trimming anything, nobody moving it out of the sun, and I want stems that forgive her for all of it. Chrysanthemum is the one. Eighteen to thirty days in a cool room, a house up there is a cool room for most of the year, ethylene does not touch it, and the foliage yellows well before the head gives up so it looks alive long after a rose would have dropped its petals on the bench. One caution, and it runs in a direction people do not expect. To a Chinese or an Italian household a chrysanthemum reads as a cemetery flower, and it is the wrong thing to put in front of a woman who has just had a baby. If that is the family, send carnation. Eighteen to twenty-four days in a cool house, waxy petals that shrug off dry heater air in July, same fortnight of asking her for nothing. One string attached, though, and it is the opposite of the chrysanthemum. Carnation sits at the very top of that ethylene scale, up there with the delphinium. Give it a bench with no fruit on it. A week beside a bowl of pears and the petals curl in on themselves like the thing has gone to sleep standing up.

Somebody has had your kid for six hours a day since the end of January and you have been meaning to do something about that all year. It is now the last fortnight of term and you have about four days.

There is no shopping centre at Eglinton, no train, and 2.2 cars per household because there is no other way to do anything out there. What holds the place together is Eglinton Public School on Alexander Street, roughly four hundred kids and about a century and a half of them, and the whole day is timed off the school bell.

I will own a bias on this one. Almost everything that happens to this company gets decided at our dinner table or somewhere within earshot of a netball court, so a suburb that runs its entire day off a school bell is one I understand better than most of the places I write about, and I have still never driven through it.

So the thank you orders into Eglinton cluster hard in the last fortnight of the school year, and they are not all for teachers. Office staff, the person who has run the canteen for a decade, the parent who ran the fete. In our florists' experience it goes to the front office in the morning and gets walked through from there. Presentation and graduation week in November and December is the other spike, and if it is a Year 12 leaving, graduation flowers are a different order again, usually going to the house, because nobody wants a bunch handed to them halfway through a presentation night.

Anna on what a staffroom does to a bunch

Colour is the whole thing in a room like that, and it is the part nobody thinks about because on a screen every bunch is thirty centimetres from your eye and lit properly. Nobody decorated a staffroom. Grey carpet, laminate, a noticeboard, one window. Deep reds and purples die in that light. From four metres they read as a dark patch, and a dark patch reads as small. Yellow, orange and hot pink carry across a room like that and keep carrying under fluorescents, which is the second half of the problem, because fluorescent light is missing the warm end of the spectrum and it takes the life out of anything that was relying on it. It is the same reason a bunch can look wonderful in the shop and flat on the desk it was bought for. Send colour that is doing the work, not colour that needs help.

Fine. Most orders are not a category. Somebody got the job. Somebody is in hospital in town for a week and get well is the closest box to tick even though nobody has said the word well yet. Somebody's mother died and there is a service in Bathurst on Friday, and funeral flowers are their own job with their own rules, which is worth knowing out here, because Eglinton has no cemetery in it and no aged care home either, and that tells you more about the place than the census does. Somebody has been picking your kids up on Thursdays all year and you have never once said thank you properly.

The call I could never do anything useful with never changed. A bloke, usually, and it opened the same way every time: just send something nice. And I would ask what the occasion was and he would say there is not really one, and I would ask what she likes and he would say I do not know, flowers. Then I would try to sell him a decision he did not have, which was my mistake and it took me a while to see it. He had already told me everything I needed, in the part I was treating as the problem. No occasion, no colour, no brief. The man was handing the job to somebody who does it for a living, which is the exact thing a florist's choice is built for and the only thing on the site that is. They walk to the buckets that came in strongest and they build. What I should have asked him, and what I would ask you, is the one question the website cannot: which room is it going in, and how far away will she be standing when she first sees it. Give the florist that and you can leave the rest alone. The same rule works fine under sixty dollars.