Flowers Delivered to Townsville, Ward, Gate or Door

A lot of the people in that hospital are not from here. It is the only tertiary referral centre in North Queensland and the health service puts its catchment at almost 700,000 people, from Mackay to the Torres Strait and west to the Territory border. So the patient was flown or driven in from somewhere else, and whoever is sending flowers is usually further away again. You are choosing for a room you have never seen, for somebody who is in a city neither of you is from.

Sort it first, then wait for a ward. Flowers for the patient go to the hospital; flowers for the family sitting with them go to wherever they are staying, which is very often not their own house. And anything ordered while somebody is still in emergency arrives before there is anywhere to put it and sits at reception with no name attached. Once the ward is known, put the full patient name and the ward number in the notes. If you do not have it, ask the person who told you they were admitted, or ring the switchboard. A referral hospital also discharges at short notice, so if they are going home to Ingham tomorrow, send it to Ingham. Order by 2pm on a weekday and it is on the ward that afternoon. For the card, short does more on a ward than a verse does: "Thinking of you Dad, we will see you Friday." Hospital flowers and get well flowers both cover it.

We have done this run ourselves, badly, before any of it was a system. In 2007 the flowers had to be at reception at Murwillumbah Hospital, Asha was screaming in the back of the car, it was 37 degrees and there was nowhere to park. Five minutes, no system, one very unhappy baby. It is why the notes field on this page asks for more than most.

And if some part of you is asking whether flowers even help, there is a randomised trial on exactly that. Ninety surgical patients, half in rooms with flowers. The flower rooms took less pain medication, ran lower blood pressure and heart rate, and 93 per cent said they would choose the same room again against 73 per cent of the others. That is not marketing copy. That is a controlled study.

Anna, qualified florist

A box beats a vase here, and a hand-tie is the worst of the three. Nobody on a ward has scissors and a spare vase, and a clerk is not going to go looking for one, so a wrapped bunch sits in its paper until a visitor brings a container. A box sits flat on a table that already holds a jug, a chart and a phone charger, and carries its own water. Skip potted plants entirely, because the soil carries Aspergillus and Fusarium spores, which is why plants get refused on wards that will happily take cut flowers. Lilies are the other one, and the reason is better than most people assume: the pollen sits exposed on the stamens, it goes airborne, it lands on staff uniforms and it travels into rooms of patients who never saw the flowers. If somebody wants that look, pollen-free Asiatic lilies exist and are unscented. Otherwise gerbera, chrysanthemum and a low spray of roses do everything you want. Ask for the gerberas wired, or they fold at the neck inside two days in this heat.

You have been given a date and you are quietly working out whether flowers are still the right thing. Flowers do nothing about what has happened and everybody involved knows it. What they do is put your name in the room on a day you cannot be in it. In most of the country the timing question has a three day answer. Here it depends on whose funeral it is.

Condolences go to the home. Service flowers go to the funeral director with the date and time on the order, and for a 10am service they want to be there by nine. Three days is the Anglo-Australian rhythm and it is not everybody's. Chinese, Muslim and Jewish funerals often happen inside 24 to 48 hours. Vietnamese families frequently hold the wake at home for three to five days, and flowers want to arrive while the wake is still running. A Greek Orthodox wreath wants to be at the church about 45 minutes ahead. And Townsville carries one of the largest urban Torres Strait Islander populations in the country, where a tombstone opening is set by the family a year or more after the burial, so an order placed eighteen months on is not late at all. Writing the card, name the person and keep it short. Wreaths and sheaves go to a chapel; sympathy flowers for the home go to the house.

White carries almost everywhere. The exceptions are short and specific. Red is the hard avoid at a Chinese or Vietnamese service, where it reads as celebrating the death. For Muslim families flowers are welcome at the home after the burial where the family says so, and never at the mosque. For Jewish families flowers at a mourning house cause genuine offence, and a food hamper to the shiva house is the gesture that lands. Townsville's Filipino community is the largest non-Anglo language group here and overwhelmingly Catholic, so All Souls' on 2 November brings a second wave of cemetery orders long after the funerals. And for a First Nations family, Australian natives carry weight an imported bunch does not, because they connect the person to Country. Banksia, kangaroo paw, wattle.

Which is a lot to hold, so here is the shortcut. Ask. One question to whoever gave you the date, "does the family have any preferences for the flowers", clears every line above it, and not once has anybody taken it badly. Then tell the florist which destination it is, because a wreath has wire and a frame through it, and that construction is right on a chapel easel and wrong on a kitchen table.

The flowers are gone inside a fortnight. Families keep the card, often for years, and it usually ends up somewhere they see it. Write it like something that gets read more than once.

Roughly one person in twelve in this city is in uniform, married to somebody who is, or a kid who came along with the posting. Most arrived from Adelaide, Perth, Hobart or regional New South Wales, and December and January are when the whole thing moves again. Nobody in that arrangement picked Townsville off a list. A posting runs three years and the middle of it goes quiet, which is usually when somebody decides to send something. There is no window on this one. It lands the same whenever you send it.

A base is not a doorstep, and it is the one thing worth knowing before you order. Lavarack runs four gates on four sets of hours, laid out below, and a driver without a Defence pass stops for a visitor card first. So the recipient walks out to meet the delivery, and a mobile number on the order is not optional. Same at the RAAF base, where the Ingham Road access point works 7am to 4pm on weekdays. Thinking of you flowers is where most of these orders come from.

The format matters more here than the flower list does, and that is Anna's territory.

Send something that can wait. A gate delivery sits in a car or on a desk for an hour before it reaches anybody, and a soft hand-tie in a 30 degree carpark is finished by lunchtime. Banksia, kangaroo paw, chrysanthemum, wrapped loose so the air still moves through it. Skip waxflower, which everyone assumes is bulletproof because it is a native. Water stress makes it produce its own ethylene and then it shatters, every floret off the stem at once, and it looks like somebody shook the bunch over a bin.

None of those three matched. Fair enough. Most people ordering into Townsville are working from an address and a first name.

Then send a box arrangement. In this city it is the safest object you can put in front of somebody: it does not tip in a van, does not need a vase found for it, does not need water changed by a nurse or a receptionist or a bloke on a gate, and it fits on a bedside table next to the machines. Ask for leucadendron and chrysanthemum through it, and on the bench that combination holds ten days and better in a Townsville room. One caveat on the chrysanthemum: in Chinese, Vietnamese and Italian households it is specifically a funeral flower, so it is the wrong call for a celebration going to one of those doors. If that is the door, ask for gerbera and lisianthus instead. If you want to spend more, spend it on cymbidium orchid over a bigger bunch of roses. It runs about two dollars a stem wholesale and gives eight to fourteen days in this heat, which is the best longevity per dollar on this page. And do not agonise over the stem list. Colour gets noticed first, size second, and the construction holding it together never gets a mention. Pick the colour you want and let the bench sort the rest. Start with flower arrangements, or with flowers under $60 if the budget is doing the deciding.