Flower Delivery Eumundi, Same Day From a Florist Nearby

It's a Wednesday or a Saturday, and if she has a stall at the Eumundi Markets (or she's the sort who never misses them) she's on Memorial Drive from half past seven until two, and home some time after that, tired and a bit sunburnt. Send it to the house anyway and put her mobile in the notes, so there's a way to reach her if the place is empty when the flowers turn up. For a big one there are our 50th birthday flowers, and for a mate, birthday flowers for a friend keep it easy.

If the vase she reaches for is a wide pottery jug, leave the florist's tie on. A wide mouth lets the stems splay, and the bunch falls open by the second day. Tied, they stay standing together. Cut the stems down so the tie sits just above the rim and the jug holds them upright. A wide jug needs the tie more than the flowers do.

Plenty of couples marry out this way, at the Imperial Hotel or on someone's property up a hinterland road, and the day itself is so full that flowers sent into it tend to get lost somewhere between the photos and the speeches. Send them for the morning after, to wherever the couple are staying, when there's finally time to look. Celebration flowers suit the pair of them, or go all white if you want it to feel like the day again.

Summer out here can turn up a thirty-eight degree day, and we learned what that does to lilies the hard way. One December, on a day that hot, we made lily posies for a bridal party out of our shop on Marine Parade in Kingscliff, and by the end of the photos the petals were brown and papery at the edges. A few days later the bride's mother came into the shop and threw them on the floor in front of Andrew and me. We didn't know enough then to steer a bride away from lilies for an outdoor posy in that heat, and I still think about her.

Anna, on lilies in a warm room

Warmth pushes an Oriental lily's buds open before the stem is ready to hold them, so in a hot room the whole stem blooms at once and the show is over far sooner than it should be. Somewhere cooler and out of the sun, the buds open one after another across a week or more, and that slow unfolding is the reason to send lilies at all. Pinch the anthers off as each flower opens and the pollen never reaches the tablecloth.

Ask the family which part of Eumundi Cemetery on Bunya Road. The council runs a natural burial area there, in forest with no headstones, and it asks for fresh flowers only; plastic and fabric ones aren't allowed in that section. If that's where it is, write natural burial in the notes so the florist knows to keep plastic out of it. Between 2006 and 2009 Andrew and I laid sheaves on the grass at the Tweed Valley Lawn Cemetery on Eviron Road more times than I could count, nearly all of them in cellophane, and not one would have suited a grave under trees.

For the day itself, start with our funeral sympathy flowers. If you'd rather not send to the service at all, flowers to the family's home a week or so later often mean the most, once the house has gone quiet. For the card, "So sorry. Thinking of you all today." or "With love, wishing I could be there."

Anna, on what goes into the ground

Floral foam is a plastic. Left on a grave it crumbles into green specks that stay in the soil long after the flowers are gone, so I'd never put a foam-based piece under those trees. A sheaf is the shape for it: stems laid flat and tied, nothing underneath. Natives belong there, and leucadendron holds its shape in the heat for well over a week.

Some orders don't fit a heading: a new job, a rough week, a friend you haven't rung since Easter. You don't need a category to send flowers.

Anna's pick for these is a mixed bunch.

Every stem has a season. Peonies are around for a few weeks of late spring, sunflowers are summer, and the pictures online look the same all year. Let the florist choose from whatever came into the market at its best that morning and you get the stems with the most life in them. Name one flower and you've tied their hands.