Flowers Delivered to Glenbrook, Where the Climb Starts

None of this makes the week any shorter. You know that already, and you are doing it anyway, which is the part that counts. Two different gestures, though, and people get them mixed up under pressure. Flowers to the service go to the funeral director or the church with the service date on them. Flowers to the family go to the house, usually inside about three days, and those are the ones that get looked at every morning for a week.

Most services here route down to the chapels off Raymond Lane in Springwood, or to a parish church in the village, and the cremations go through Leura Memorial Gardens. Ask the funeral director which one it is, because it changes both the address and the hour. Our florists work backwards from the service time rather than the delivery date, since a wreath that lands an hour late has missed the whole thing. If you are sending to the family home instead, the card is doing most of the work. Short is better. "Thinking of you and your family" is enough, and nobody has ever wished a sympathy card had been longer. Worth getting right, because the flowers are gone in a fortnight and the card ends up in a drawer and gets found again in five years. Nobody at a funeral is measuring the tributes either. A modest sheaf with the right name on it does the same work as a big one.

Two things about Glenbrook change what lands well here. It is not the churchgoing suburb people picture: more households here report no religion than any single denomination, 41.6% at the last census against 22% Catholic and 15.9% Anglican, so a good share of these are celebrations of life. And in the families that are Catholic, the flowers do not finish at the funeral. A month's mind and a first anniversary Mass both come around, and plenty of the sympathy orders we take for this area are the second or third one for the same person.

The white-only default is worth questioning here. A white sheaf for a funeral is safe and it is right for a lot of families. A celebration of life reads better with the flowers the person actually liked. Wattle from August, banksia and grevillea through most of the year, eucalypt for structure, waratah when it comes in around October. Those hold on a stand in a cold chapel for the length of a service and keep going at the house afterwards, which a soft white bunch will not do. If nobody is sure what the family would want, ask them. Asking is the only safe universal in this part of the job. For the flowers going to the family home, go the other way and keep the fragrance low. A house full of people does not need a competing smell.

It has been longer than you meant it to be. That is the single most common order we see on this page, and it is almost always an adult child in Sydney sending to a parent who never left the family home in Glenbrook.

The practical bit: give us a mobile number for her, not just the landline, and tell us where the safe spot is. Under the carport. Behind the gate but before the dog. Our florists find the porch on a bush block faster with one line of description than with a street number, and on a block with mature trees the house number on the letterbox is often the only thing visible from the road. A thinking of you bunch works without a reason attached, and the card can be four words. "No reason. Love you."

Most people default to a wrapped bunch. Anna would send the box.

A hand-tied bunch means somebody has to find the scissors, find a vase, cut the stems and fill it. For a woman on her own in a big house that is a five minute job she may or may not get to that afternoon. A box arrangement turns up with its own water in the foam and goes straight onto the kitchen table. Same rule at Merindal Hamlet or any aged care reception, where the staff have plenty on and nobody is topping up a vase every second day. One more thing while you are choosing: keep to flowers she would know from her own garden. Roses, daisies, lavender, something she has a memory attached to. She wants the one she recognises.

She will not make a fuss about it on the phone. She will move it to wherever she sits, though, and it will be the first thing she looks at every morning for a fortnight. Which is you, in the room, for a fortnight.

She is turning seventy and she has views about flowers, which she has had for about fifty years and is not revising now. Glenbrook households skew older and better off than the rest of the lower mountains, so the birthday order here is far more often a seventieth than a twenty-first.

Send them to the house on the morning of, not to the restaurant at lunchtime. Half these streets have somebody home during the day, so a morning delivery usually gets a real handover at the door, and she gets the whole day with them instead of the last hour of it. Flowers that turn up at a booked lunch get carried around for the rest of the afternoon and put in water at eight o'clock at night, by which point the day has done its damage.

For a seventieth I would rather build something with weight than something with a lot of stems, and weight usually costs less than volume. Lisianthus, a few garden roses, chrysanthemum through the middle for structure. In a cool Glenbrook lounge room that combination will still look like an arrangement two weeks out, because the chrysanthemum is the most temperature-resilient thing in the bucket and it holds the shape while the roses do the opening. And if the birthday falls between now and about September, take the tulips or the ranunculus. Winter is the one time of year I stop putting a warning next to them. In a warm room a tulip is fully open in two or three days and done inside the week. In a cold Glenbrook room it takes five or six days just to open, and you are closer to a fortnight all up. One warning that costs nothing: keep it off the mantelpiece. I have seen more good arrangements ruined by a lit fire underneath them than by any delivery van.

Before or after they get home, both are fine. The gesture is not tied to the day, and there is no wrong window here. Worth knowing while you write the card: it gets read out loud, to each other, at about two in the morning.

What matters is that Glenbrook babies are almost all born down the escarpment at Nepean in Kingswood, about eight kilometres east. It is a 520-bed teaching hospital and the maternity referral centre for the whole Nepean Blue Mountains district, which is why the new baby flowers so often go the other way, down the hill. From what our florists have seen, a hospital delivery needs the mother's full name and the ward, it goes to reception, not the bedside, and ward staff carry it through when they get a moment. Order once the ward is known. An arrangement sent while she is still in birthing suite tends to sit at reception with nobody to hand it to.

Anna on what travels well to a ward

Maternity wards will usually take flowers where an oncology or intensive care ward will not, but the format decides how well that goes. Nobody on a postnatal ward has a spare vase and it is not the clerk's job to find one, so a hand-tied bunch stays wrapped on the tray table until a visitor rescues it. Send a box or a vase arrangement. Leave the lilies out of it, because the pollen goes airborne, it transfers off staff uniforms into other rooms, and close to one in five Australians has a pollen allergy. If somebody has their heart set on lilies, ask for a pollen-free Asiatic variety. Same look, no anthers, nothing to drop on a bassinet sheet. And there is measurable evidence behind putting flowers in a hospital room at all. A surgical trial followed ninety patients through recovery. The ones with plants and flowers in the room asked for fewer painkillers, and ninety-three per cent said they would choose the same room again. In the bare rooms it was seventy-three.

Plenty of them do not. Somebody has had a rough month, or a good result came through, or you drove past the turnoff and thought of them. You do not need a category to send flowers, and picking the wrong one off a menu does not change what turns up.

If you want a default for this town, it is a mixed native bunch, and the Australian Natives Bunch at $126.20 is the one most people take. Banksia, grevillea, a leucadendron or two through the back, wattle once August turns, and something soft in the middle so it does not read as all bark. It suits a house on a bush block, it survives being left in a covered spot for a few hours, and it will outlast an imported rose bunch of the same price by about a week.

There is a second reason it works here that has nothing to do with vase life. Glenbrook has a native plant reserve sitting on the highway in the middle of town, so people in this suburb know these plants by sight the way other suburbs know roses. A banksia bunch arriving at a Glenbrook door reads as chosen. It does not read as the cheap option, which is the worry that stops most people sending natives in the first place. And it does not commit you to a message. Roses say one thing and lilies say another. Nobody has ever misread a banksia. If you would rather leave it to the person holding the buckets, florist's choice means they build from whatever came in strongest that morning.