Erina Flowers, Delivered the Same Day You Can't Make the Drive

Flowers will not carry what you actually want to say from this far away. You already know that. They still say it better than silence does.

The first thing to settle is where they go. Condolences for the family go to the family home. A tribute for the service goes to the funeral director, with the service date written on the order. Get the funeral home and the date confirmed before you order, because a funeral arrangement that turns up after the chapel has emptied cannot be re-sent. We have learned to ask the date twice. If words will not come, "Thinking of you and your family" is enough, and using their name says more than a paragraph would, and it is the card that outlasts the flowers. The arrangement is gone in a week or two; the card ends up in a drawer and is still there a year on, which is when a lot of people here send again, marking the anniversary, often a widow or widower remembering their own partner.

Anna, qualified florist

I would not default to all-white for a service around here. White is the safe fallback, but Erina is split between Catholic and Anglican families who expect it and a growing number who want a send-off that actually sounds like the person. Ask what they grew. Natives carry a "he loved the bush" goodbye better than a lily ever will, and they last. Chrysanthemums are right and expected at a Catholic service, but never send them on their own to an Italian household as a gift, where they read as funeral flowers and nothing else.

Maybe a parent has lost their husband or wife, and the house has gone quiet in a way a phone call does not quite reach. You might be holding back, half-worried that flowers are too much, or too little, or one more thing for her to manage. It rarely is. A quiet house is not made quieter by knowing someone thought of her. Nearly one in six people in Erina is widowed, so this is not a rare order here. And around one in eight households here has no car, which means for a lot of these people a delivery is not a convenience, it is how the flowers arrive at all.

These go to the home, or to a retirement village reception if that is where they have moved to. Older residents are often out at an appointment or a day program when the driver comes, so put the unit number, the village name and a phone number in the notes. That way reception can take the thinking-of-you order and walk it through rather than the driver leaving it on a step. No reason is needed on the card, by the way; "just thinking of you" is the whole message.

Anna took this exact order more times than she can count.

The thinking-of-you flowers to a widowed mum were one of the steadiest calls I had off the phones. The advice I gave then is the same now: send something in a box she does not have to arrange, and send it long-lasting. Carnations, chrysanthemums and lisianthus hold for a fortnight, which matters when nobody is topping up the water for her. A no-occasion bunch that is still going strong two weeks later does more than one that is spent in three days.

Nearly one in seven people in Erina is over eighty-five, which gives this suburb more ninetieth birthdays per head than almost anywhere in the state. You cannot be at the table for one, so the flowers go on your behalf, and they sit there long after the cake is gone. That gap, between you not being there and the gift still being there, is most of the point.

And if she is far enough into dementia that she might not hold on to who the flowers came from, send them anyway. She will see the colour by the bed, the staff will read your card out to her, and the gesture does its work, remembered or not. It is as much for you as for her, and that is allowed.

Reception takes the delivery, not the resident's door. Put her full name and the room or wing in the notes, because staff cannot find a "Mrs Smith" without the given name and the part of the building she is in. With that on the order, a delivery to one of the 90th birthday or 80th birthday kind reaches the right bedside, usually within a few hours.

Make it a box arrangement for a room like that, every time. A hand-tied bunch needs a vase and someone to fill it, and there is nobody on the ward shift to do it. Keep it low and unscented; the strong fragrances that read as luxury in a big house become a problem in a small shared room, more so on a dementia wing. Dementia runs at close to ten times the national rate in Erina, so that wing is not a rare delivery. Familiar stems land better than anything tropical. The birthday orders I steered for the care homes were roses, carnations and chrysanthemums, near enough every time.

If none of those is quite your situation, that is normal. Half the orders we take do not fit a neat box.

When in doubt for Erina, send white and send it long-lasting. White reads right across a Catholic service, an Anglican one and a secular goodbye, which between them covers most of this suburb, and it never looks wrong on a birthday or a bedside either. White lisianthus and chrysanthemum hold a fortnight, and if you add a few white roses the box will not fade all at once: the roses open and go first, the lisianthus follows, and the chrysanthemums hold to the end, so by day eight she is looking at a different arrangement than the one that arrived. And you do not have to spend big to get it right; the money goes further in stems that last than in a big arrangement that fades in a few days, which is the worst value of all for a room where nobody can replace the water. Tell the florist who it is for and let them build to it; that is what they are good at.