Flowers Delivered to Grafton, Both Sides of the River

Flowers do not fix this and you already know that. They are what you send when you cannot be in the room, and everyone in the room understands the code.

There are two gestures here and they go to two different addresses. Condolence flowers go to the family's house, usually inside three days. Service flowers, the wreaths and sheaves and casket work, go to the funeral director with the full name of the person who died and the date and time of the service. Without the service time the florist cannot land it, and late to a funeral is the one delivery nobody can repair. Grafton has three funeral directors for a town this size, and one of them has the crematorium on site on Prince Street, which quietly changes the pattern: cremation services generate more flowers at the house afterwards and fewer at a graveside.

The other thing to get right is which cemetery. Grafton has three and only one of them is still taking new interments. Clarence Lawn, out on Armidale Road in South Grafton, does the burials. The old grounds on Villiers Street and on the Bent and Tyson corner are reserved plots only, which means nearly everyone in them has been there a very long time. Every so often somebody gives us one of those two as a funeral address, and it is almost always wrong. Our partner florist in or close to Grafton catches it before the flowers move.

Put your full name on the card, too. The family is reading fifty of them, and "love, Kaz" means nothing to a husband who has never met you. There are no right words and nobody expects you to find them, so "thinking of you and your family" is enough. The flowers are gone inside a fortnight. The card goes in a drawer and stays there for years.

Clarence Lawn is a lawn cemetery, and that changes the vase. Grass will not hold one upright. On lawn, a wreath or a sheaf sits flat and stays put. On the old grounds, stone surrounds hold a vase up.

Three nations meet at this river. Bundjalung on the north bank, Gumbaynggirr on the south, Yaegl downstream. If a caller told me the family was Aboriginal, I asked whether they had checked with the family first. Every community is different, and Sorry Business runs for as long as it runs. If flowers were welcome, natives every time. Banksia, wattle, kangaroo paw. Those connect to Country in a way an imported rose never will. I never assumed. Neither should the florist.

You have not been down since Easter. It is a four hour drive each way and something has come up every single time. Both of those can be true at once.

The worry here is rarely the flowers. It is whether she will know who they came from, which means the card does more work than the stems do. Put your full name on it, not "love, your girl". Put her full name and the facility name in the delivery notes, because "Mum, Whiddon" will not find her. There are a hundred and ten rooms in that building and reception cannot go door to door guessing. Expect a lag once it lands, too. Sometimes an hour, sometimes the rest of a shift. Reception has a desk to run and forty other things on it.

We send a lot of eightieth birthday arrangements into this valley and hardly any thirtieths, so this is the order we handle more than any other. Thinking of you flowers need no reason attached either. Nobody has ever complained about being thought of on a Wednesday, and if you are stuck on the card, "just wanted you to know I'm thinking of you" has never once been the wrong thing to write.

Whiddon runs a secure wing on top of that, twenty three rooms. If that is where you are sending, she may not know who they came from, or that they came at all. The flowers might mean more to you than to them. That is okay. Send them anyway.

A woman rang me once from Perth wanting the biggest thing we had for her mother in a nursing home. I talked her down to about a third of it, and not to save her money. A big bunch on a small bedside table becomes the staff's problem by Thursday, and it gets shifted to a windowsill where she cannot see it from the bed. Small, low, boxed, no water to knock over, nothing that needs a vase found for it. Her mother had that little box in front of her for a fortnight. The big one would have lasted three days in her eyeline and then gone to live behind a curtain.

You cannot get there, and somebody else is doing the drive twice a day. Flowers are what you send when you cannot sit in the chair beside the bed.

Grafton Base is the only base hospital for the mid Clarence, so the patient is very often not a Grafton person at all. They came in from Ulmarra or Coutts Crossing or Copmanhurst, and the family doing that drive is still out there.

From what our florists have seen, get well flowers go to the main reception on Arthur Street, a ward clerk takes them in, and nursing staff do the last leg to the bedside. Anywhere between half an hour and three hours, depending on what else the ward is doing. Full name and ward number in the delivery notes, because reception is not going to go looking for a surname.

I used to do these runs myself, back when we still had the shop. Murwillumbah Hospital, Asha screaming in the back of the car, thirty seven degrees outside, five minutes to get the flowers to reception and nowhere in the street to park. So the ward number in the notes matters more than it looks. With it, a nurse walks it in. Without it, the bunch sits on the desk until somebody has a spare minute.

Anna on ward flowers

Send it to the house instead. A base hospital with a short stay unit turns people around quickly, and the bunch you sent on Tuesday afternoon can arrive after the patient has been driven back out to Ulmarra. Under a couple of days, the house wins every time. If they are properly staying put, skip the lilies. Pollen, heavy fragrance and a four bed bay do not go together, and lilies were the most declined stem in any ward I dealt with. Roses, gerberas, carnations, chrysanthemums, natives, all fine. Send it boxed rather than hand tied. Nobody on that ward has a spare vase or ten minutes to find one.

Most orders are not a category. They are a person you were thinking about on a Wednesday for no particular reason, and none of the three above covers that. If you want the Grafton answer, Anna has one.

Purple. All year, not only in November. The Purple and Lilac Bunch is the closest thing on our site to what this town looks like for about four weeks a year, and the strange part is that it works best in July, when the trees are bare sticks and nobody outside the valley is thinking about jacarandas at all. If the budget is tight, purple travels better than most colours at the lower end, because statice and lisianthus both punch well above what they cost, so there is no shame in the under sixty end of the range here.