Foulden Flower Delivery Today, Even in the Cane Harvest

It’s their birthday, and during the crush (the cane harvest, June until late in the year) they could be out in the paddock until dark. The number on the letterbox only gets the flowers to the gate, so add the driveway (a shed or tank you’d know it by), a mobile, and a shady spot in case nobody’s home. If it’s a bloke’s birthday, there are birthday flowers for him, and a whole range for a 50th.

I learned the letterbox lesson in the winter of 2007, taking a birthday bunch to a woman on a cane farm past the Condong mill on the Tweed, Asha asleep in the back. Her number was painted on an old cream can at the road and the family was out with the harvester, so I left the flowers in the shade of the tank stand. Her husband found them and carried them in like he’d grown them himself. Foulden is no different.

Natives suit a farm birthday, and a man who’d never buy himself flowers most of all. Banksia and protea look sturdy and handsome, and a protea will still be standing a week on.

Someone from the farm is in hospital and you can’t get there. Mackay Base Hospital is just over the river on Bridge Road, and in our experience flowers stop at the ward desk first, so with the full name and the ward in the notes (it’s usually in a text from the family somewhere), our hospital flowers reach the right bed. The card can be short: “Rest up. The cane will keep.”

Anna’s call: a boxed flower arrangement. The box is the vase, so nobody on a ward has to hunt for one, and a splash of water into the foam it sits in every couple of days keeps it going.

You’ve read the notice, and now it’s where to send the flowers. For the service, the notes need the funeral director (Mackay Funerals on Alfred Street, say, or Whitsunday Funerals on Shakespeare Street), the full name of the person who has died and the start time. Or send sympathy flowers to the house afterwards. Flowers won’t bring the harvest in, and the family still remembers who sent them. “Thinking of you all out there” says enough.

Anna, on a bunch that does two jobs

A hand-tied bunch has a wet wrap at its base that keeps it going a few hours at the service without a vase, then it goes home and lasts about a week. Recut the stems when it gets there, because after a few hours in a wrap the cut ends start to seal and the heads droop. For the casket, a sheath lies flat.

Plenty of orders don’t fit a heading. Anna’s answer comes from our native flowers, which, funnily enough, outsell everything else we send.

The Australian Native Arrangement. It’s set in wet foam, so it drinks the whole time it waits, and the leucadendron in it can go well past a week in a warm house. When the soft stems finish, the woody ones dry on a shelf for months.