Same Day Flowers to Faulconbridge, Bush Blocks Included

Sixty is the one the family flies in for, and you are the one who cannot. Two adults on the early train to Central is the ordinary shape of a weekday here. The house is empty until six, so name the drop spot on the order, a covered porch or the side door by name. Our florists tend to photograph where they left it. They will be on the bench when she walks in, and still there when the family have gone home on Sunday. That gap is what you are paying for.

Chrysanthemum and carnation, and I will not be talked out of it. I know how carnations sound. The bench ones come in tight and open across a week, and both of these will sit on a shaded porch through a July day and be worth putting in water at six. Cold air is fine. It is frost on the surface that does the damage, which is why the winter run waits for it to lift. Tulips keep growing after they are cut, two centimetres a night, and they lean toward the light, so by Thursday they have stopped looking like a present. On a 60th go a size up from wherever you are hovering. No one has ever rung me to say the bunch was too big.

Flowers do not fix it. You know that, and you are sending them anyway from ninety kilometres away, which is the whole of what they are for. Faulconbridge Cemetery is closed to new burials, so a service runs through a Springwood director. Service flowers go to that director with the date and time on the order. Graveside and memorial tributes go to the cemetery, and condolences go to the house, within three days of the notice.

Anna, on which kind of funeral you are dealing with.

A Mass at Springwood is a different job to a celebration of life in somebody's garden. For a church, the wreath is the form, and white lilies are what the family will look for. For a garden, ask for it foam-free and hand-tied in water. The families who choose that funeral notice a plastic base. Banksia and grevillea are hard-wooded and hold their shape outdoors all day, and they want the stem bases crushed or they stop drinking. Waratah is spring only and the dearest head in the market, so out of season ask for leucadendron by name. Keep the card short. Thinking of you and your family is enough, and the card is the bit that stays in a drawer for years.

The commonest order going up the mountain is a Sydney-side adult child sending to a parent who chose the bush and stayed. No occasion. Just a gap that got longer than anyone planned. There is no deadline on that except the one we set, and 2pm on a weekday puts it on the porch before they are home.

What Anna sends when there is no occasion

Alstroemeria, every time. Above twenty degrees it sulks and drops early. At fifteen it runs a fortnight, and often a good week past that. I have watched the same stems hold two weeks on a cool bench and fall over in seven days in a warm one. She will still be moving that vase on day twelve, about a week longer than the same bunch gives at Bondi, and it is what I reach for when there is nothing to hang it on, or an anniversary that came round faster than it should have.

Fair enough, and it is the easiest question we get. My first ever flower call, about a week into owning the place, a woman fired a run of questions at me and I had nothing. I told her to hang on while I checked with my wife. Siobhan knew less than I did.

So here is what I'd send you. A native box around the hundred and twenty mark, built foam-free with the stems sitting in water. Nobody standing at a bush-block door at six in the evening has a vase and a pair of scissors within reach, and a box has already solved that. The banksia in it grew on the NSW coast. The roses beside it flew in from Bogota, and you can see the difference by day four. If you would rather I picked the lot, Florist's Choice takes the best of that morning's market.