Highgate Hill Flower Delivery, Past the Locked Lobby to Their Door

Someone you love has just had a baby at the Mater Mothers', and you are reading this from somewhere you cannot drive from today. That is most new-baby orders into this suburb. There is something strange about marking the happiest day of someone's year through a screen from another state, and the flowers close a little of that distance.

Flowers for a maternity patient go to the patient desk rather than into the room, and from what our florists see the staff take them up under the mother's name, so the order goes under her name and her room number, never the baby's. Maternity stays are short, so the safe move is to order once she is settled on the floor, not while she is still in the birth suite. New baby flowers in a box travel better than a hand-tied bunch with no vase to stand in.

Pollen-free, every time, for a newborn's room. Pollen-free Asiatic lilies give you the lily look with no staining pollen and no scent to carry across a shared room, because the sterile varieties have no anthers to drop on the cot linen. Keep the palette soft, and nothing goes to the Special Care Nursery, the babies there are too fragile for cut flowers. Skip the oriental lily too: beautiful flower, wrong room.

When someone you care about is in one of the inner-south hospitals, the part that gnaws is not being able to get there yourself.

Order once they are on a general ward. The Mater and the Princess Alexandra take get well flowers at the patient desk, and the ward clerk runs them to the bedside, usually within a few hours. From what our florists have seen, intensive care, coronary care and oncology do not take fresh flowers, so it pays to know which floor they are on before you order. One honest thing worth saying: the Queensland Children's Hospital on Stanley Street is pollen-free and takes no fresh flowers at all. If you are sending to a child there, send a mylar balloon or a gift, or have the order delivered to the family at home instead. For the adult hospitals, hospital flowers are straightforward once you have the patient's name and room.

If you are not sure how they are doing, bright reads as good news and something softer carries if it is more uncertain. You do not need the diagnosis to get it right.

Anna has a firm view on what should go in the box.

Skip the lilies and skip the heavy scent. A shared room has someone in the next bed who did not choose your flowers, and fragrance carries. Chrysanthemums, carnations, lisianthus and a few natives hold no pollen and last, and a leucadendron will outlive everything else in the vase by a week. Box or vase, not hand-tied, because there are no spare vases on the bedside table.

The inner-south carries a real mix of traditions, Greek Orthodox, Italian, Chinese and Vietnamese among them, and a sympathy order that lands wrong is a mistake that stays with people. Flowers will not undo the loss, and the family knows that, but they say you are thinking of them when you cannot be in the room.

Condolences go to the home; service flowers go to the church or the funeral director with the service date on the card, and for an older family grave it may be the heritage cemetery at Dutton Park. A short line travels safely across all of it, and "with deepest sympathy" never reads wrong. The St Nicholas Greek Orthodox community here, the church and the aged-care home both on Hampstead Road, keeps a memorial cycle, so the same family may order again at forty days, then three months, six months and a year. Specific funeral flowers belong at the service; a home bouquet is for the family.

Anna on white flowers across the traditions

White is the one colour that holds across Greek Orthodox, Chinese, Vietnamese and Italian customs, so when you do not know the family's background, white sympathy flowers are never the wrong call. Red is the one to avoid at a funeral across most of them. For a Greek Orthodox service it is a white wreath to the church, and the family will sometimes want the ribbon written in Greek, so ask. Chrysanthemums belong at the funeral, not as a gift to a Chinese or Italian home, where they read as funeral flowers full stop.

If the order does not fall neatly into one of those, that is most orders. Maybe it is a birthday you only remembered this morning, or you just want something good sent today without the fuss of choosing.

When you tell me nothing about the recipient except the address, I send white or something close, because that one colour covers a birthday, a thank-you, a new baby and a sympathy without ever being wrong, and I lean on natives and chrysanthemums because they take the Brisbane heat and a locked-up apartment better than anything soft. It matters more than it sounds, because a bunch still going strong a week later is a week of them being reminded who sent it. For a gift up on the ridge that needs to read expensive, a cymbidium orchid lasts a fortnight in this warmth and carries no scent. Tell us the building and we will sort the access.