Flower Delivery Hurlstone Park, Same Day, Bunch or Wreath

It's a birthday, or a name day, which plenty of Greek families here mark like a second birthday, and you can't be there to hand anything over.

Send birthday flowers to the house, or to work if they're out all day. Put a mobile in the notes and, if it's the house, say if they can be left on the verandah. For a name day, send a celebration bunch with Hronia polla on the card.

Full sun turns cellophane into a little glasshouse. The air inside heats up, the petals lose water faster than the stems can drink, and gerberas bend at the neck first. In the shade, the same bunch waits happily until someone's home.

The notice says St Stephanos on New Canterbury Road, or the Uniting church on Melford Street, and you can't get there yourself.

Send a wreath or sheath to the church, or flowers to the family home afterwards. In our experience the wreaths for a Greek Orthodox service stand at the church entrance, where the family sees them on the way in, so a wreath has to be there early. I learnt that in 2007 at St Anthony's in Kingscliff. Ten o'clock funeral, wreath ordered at nine, and I was carrying it up the side aisle at five to ten with the whole church already seated. Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. Put the service time and the family name in the notes, and a card might read May her memory be eternal.

Anna, on the round wreath

The circle is the traditional Orthodox shape, meant as eternity, and in my experience white is what the family expects. On a stand at the entrance a wreath is seen face-on, so it wants the heavier heads low in the ring and the lighter ones high. Built the other way, it looks like it's about to tip, and the eye feels that before the brain does.

Someone you love is in Canterbury Hospital, or has just moved into the Greek Community Home on Woolcott Street in Earlwood, and you're not close by.

For get well flowers, put the ward and bed in the notes. From what our florists have seen, hospital flowers are logged at the ward desk, then taken through. A card might say Getting stronger every day, love from us. For a care home, add the resident's full name and room, and look at our thinking of you flowers for someone settling into a new room.

Anna's call: something boxed, with little scent. Nobody on a ward has a spare vase, and the next bed didn't choose the perfume. Save the scented lilies for when they're home.

Some orders fit none of the above: a thank-you to a neighbour, a new house, a reason you'd keep to yourself. Anna has a view on this.

Go for the Florists Choice Bright Mixed Bunch. A florist's choice is put together from whatever is at its best in the bucket that day, so it's a mixed bunch of the season at its peak, chosen by someone who sees the stock every morning.