Ettalong Beach Flowers, Right Side of the Water

Flowers will not fix this. You know that already. They say the thing you cannot say from three hours away. The other half of it is working out where they should even go.

Two different gestures sit inside one order. Condolence flowers go to the family's home, usually within three days of the news. Service flowers, the casket and wreath pieces, go to the funeral home in Woy Woy with the service date on them, because the funeral homes there run services most days and yours has to land on the right one. Point Clare is the cemetery most Peninsula families use, and graveside pieces need to be told that in the notes. A florist in or near the area sorts the format to the venue once it is named. On the card, "Thinking of you and your family" lands better than hunting for the perfect line.

Anna, qualified florist

I steered grieving callers toward chrysanthemums and lisianthus more often than roses, and not because roses are wrong. White chrysanthemums are the traditional funeral flower in Anglo-Australian families, they last the best part of three weeks, and nobody on this coast reads them as anything but respectful. In a humid Peninsula summer I lean even harder off roses for a closed room, because the damp brings grey mould up on the petals within days. If the service is a celebration of life, and a lot of them up here are, ask for colour, even the natives that grow wild on these headlands, which sit right for a secular send-off or an Aboriginal family who would rather have them. Bright but not loud. The family chose to celebrate. The flowers can say so.

Sending flowers to someone in hospital when you cannot get there yourself is a particular kind of helpless, and half the time you are not even sure whether you are saying get well soon or hang in there.

Most Peninsula patients are at Woy Woy Hospital or Brisbane Waters Private, both a few minutes from the beach. From what our florists see, hospital flowers go to the ward reception desk, staff log them, and they reach the bedside on the next round, which can be an hour or it can be three. A box arrangement handles that wait better than a wrapped bunch, because nobody on a ward is hunting down a vase for you. "Thinking of you, get yourself home soon" is plenty for the card.

If it says White Oriental, ask them to leave the lilies out. It is one of the most popular things ordered into a suburb like this, and it is the one most likely to get pulled off a ward. Oriental lily pollen goes airborne, it stains everything it touches, and a lot of wards ban lilies outright. The florist can build the same look with lisianthus and roses and you would not pick the difference from the photo. Ten seconds on the phone and the flowers actually stay in the room.

You heard she has gone quiet, or someone said she is not quite herself, and you are too far away to just call in and check.

These thinking-of-you orders come from a long way off, for someone who lives on their own or in care, and the worry is always the same: will she even know it came. To a house, a safe-place note covers the hours she is at the markets or down the Diggers. To a facility, her full name and unit number get it to her, and the card is the part she keeps. "Thinking of you, no reason needed" says more than a long message ever does. A posy asks nothing of her in return, which matters when you are not sure how a call would land.

Anna took these calls for years.

The thinking-of-you order was the one I heard most on the phones, and it was almost never really about the flowers. It was someone who could not shake the feeling they had left it too long. I would tell them the same thing: keep it soft, keep it small. A single posy on a bedside table gets looked at every day, where a big arrangement just turns into a job for a nurse. The card outlasts the stems anyway. People keep them in a drawer long after the flowers are gone.

If none of those three quite fit, you are in the biggest group of all. Most people ordering into Ettalong Beach are not floral experts and have no wish to be.

Tell whoever takes the order one thing: the room. A small unit, a shared aged care room, a hospital bedside, a kitchen table at home. That single detail does more than any colour choice. For most sympathy and thinking-of-you orders up here I point people at a florist's choice in gentle tones and let the florist build from the best stock that came in that morning. It is the order I trusted most on the phones, and it travels to a Peninsula address better than anything you might pick by colour off a screen. And it does not have to be the big one, a smaller posy that turns up looking deliberate beats a grand arrangement that turns up tired.