Booragoon Flowers, for the Parent in the Family Home or the Care Room

A sympathy order to Booragoon is the one people most want to get right and most fear getting wrong. You are sending into someone else's grief, often a family you only half know, and the flowers cannot fix any of it. What they can do is stand in for you when you cannot be in the room.

Sort it by where it goes. Condolences go to the home. A tribute for the service goes to Oakwood Funerals on Marmion Street, or to the church, and it needs the date and time on the order, because a wreath has to be there a good hour before things begin. From what our florists have seen, the staff will place it in the right chapel if they know the time. For the card, plain holds best: thinking of you and your family. Write one line, even so. The flowers fade inside the week, and the card is the thing that gets kept.

Booragoon leans secular, more than most suburbs, so the white-lily funeral is no longer the assumed choice here. Plenty of families want the other thing: bright colour, Australian natives, the banksia and kangaroo paw that grow up on Wireless Hill and flower right through spring, something that looks like the person. More of them now ask for it built without floral foam and tied in natural twine, which any decent florist will do. The brief I always wanted on those calls was a line about who they were. If he was a gardener who bushwalked every weekend, that is kangaroo paw, grevillea and protea, and the florist builds the send-off around the man rather than reaching for a template. The Indonesian Christian community here, settled enough to have had its own congregation for years, tends to keep to the Western service, with white lilies and white roses. And the one to handle with care is the chrysanthemum: to a Chinese or Malaysian Chinese family it is the right and expected funeral flower, white or yellow, sent to the service, while to that same family on any other day it is the wrong message entirely. When you are unsure, ask, or send condolences to the home in white, which carries across nearly all of it.

This is the order for the parent you have not visited in too long, or who has moved into care and waits on the days when someone comes. A regular thinking of you bunch says the thing a phone call after a few months cannot. For the card, just thinking of you, Mum, does the work.

To an aged-care room, the flowers go to the reception desk and the staff carry them through, usually within a few hours. Put the resident's full name and room number on the order, because a first name on its own slows everyone down. At Regents Garden on Marmion Street that is the routine, and the staff are good at it.

Anna, on the flowers that suit a small room

Ask the florist for something low and stable, a box or a short vase that will not tip on a crowded bedside table, and skip anything tall or top-heavy. Keep the scent mild, since the room is often shared. And if your parent is far enough into things that the flowers may not register the way they once did, send them anyway. They might mean more to you than to her now, and that is alright. An orchid or a box of carnations will hold a fortnight on a windowsill, so she sees them long after the day you sent them, which is rather the point.

Booragoon is a suburb of long milestones. People reach a seventieth, an eightieth, a ninetieth in the same house they raised a family in, and an adult child, often the one living on the far side of Perth or interstate, wants to mark it properly.

The good news on timing is that an older recipient is more likely to be home in the day than most, so a mid-morning delivery usually lands in person. If the house is a strata townhouse with a shared gate, leave a mobile number on the order and the driver will call ahead. This is a suburb that spends properly on flowers, so there is no reason to reach for the entry-level bunch on a big birthday.

For a seventieth or beyond, an arrangement that looks like an occasion beats a tight posy every time. A generous mixed box, or natives for the gardening sort, will carry presence and hold up for a fortnight in an air-conditioned lounge room. Keep clear of the very fragile, short-lived stems for someone who will want to enjoy it slowly. And a small thing for the card of a very elderly recipient: celebrating you today travels better than wishing you many more.

Plenty of Booragoon orders are none of those three. This is a suburb of professionals and academics, so a fair share are a thank-you between colleagues, a new baby down at the hospital, a just-because for someone having a flat week. You do not have to land on the perfect category. You need it to suit the person.

Anna's default for the orders that could go a dozen ways is the same as for everything else here: lean on the stems that earn their keep in this climate. An orchid or a box of natives reads as considered and holds for weeks in an air-conditioned house or office, long after a tight posy of imported roses would have dropped. If you would rather hand the call to the bench, a florist's choice order lets them build from the best in the bucket that morning, and on the native side that is usually worth having.