Same Day Flower Delivery Glass House Mountains, Farms Too

It's Mum's birthday, she lives on a farm, and you know she'll be in the paddock or the packing shed when the florist arrives. So decide first whether the flowers go to the house or to wherever she really is mid-afternoon, because that decides between a bunch and an arrangement from our birthday flowers for Mum or the birthday bestsellers.

I found this out on Duranbah Road in 2008, on the red soil behind Kingscliff, with a birthday bunch and nobody at the house. I followed the only noise on the place, which was a tractor. She was on it. She switched off, climbed down and read the card with the engine still ticking, then sent me back to the car with a box of avocados. I'd driven out there to give her something. Farms off Steve Irwin Way run the same way, in picking season most of all, so put a mobile in the notes and the florist can find her instead of an empty kitchen.

Anna's call: an arrangement already sitting in wet foam can wait on a shed bench until knock-off. A wrapped bunch wants a vase inside the hour, so send that one to the house.

You've booked a cabin or a B&B near the mountains for the anniversary, and you'd like flowers in the room before the bags are in. That means sending them to where you're staying, so they're waiting when you both walk through the door.

Put the booking name, the name of the cabin or B&B and the check-in day in the notes. In our experience hosts are happy to take flowers in when they know who they're for; it's the unexplained bunch on the step that goes wrong. Our anniversary flowers include arrangements with their own vase, handy when the cupboard has none.

Anna, on roses and a wall of glass

A cabin built for a view tends to have a lot of glass. Afternoon sun breaks down the red pigment in a petal, and a red rose on a sunny sill goes pinkish in a couple of days. Put roses on the table, back from the window, and they hold their colour through the weekend and well past it.

Dad's gone, Mum has stayed on the farm, and you ring from Brisbane on Sundays. What you send now is either sympathy in the weeks after the service or a plain thinking-of-you a month or two on, once the visitors have stopped. Sympathy flowers for home suit the first; thinking-of-you flowers suit the second.

The card is the hard part, so keep it short: "Thinking of you out there. Talk Sunday." Or: "No reason. Just missing you." Flowers are a small thing to send into a house that big and that quiet. She'll still notice them every morning until the last one goes.

Chrysanthemums and carnations suit a house where nobody fusses over a vase. Both go a week or more even in a warm room, and carnations keep opening buds into the second week, so the bunch fills out as it goes. Keep them off the bench with the fruit bowl: ripening fruit gives off ethylene, a gas that tells a carnation to finish, and the petals curl within a day.

Plenty of orders don't come with a heading: the neighbour who slashed the back paddock while you were away, a friend you haven't rung in a while, nothing in particular. Our flower bunches are the easy place to start, and Anna would point you somewhere specific.

Go for a bunch with lilies through it. The buds open one after another, so there's a new bloom most mornings and the bunch keeps going through a hot week. Pinch the anthers off as each flower opens; dry pollen stains, so lift any that falls with sticky tape.