Kings Park VIC Flowers, Five Dates a Year That Change Them

You have a name, a weight and a time, and no idea which ward she is on. Good news, arriving by phone, the way it does for everybody not in the room. Joan Kirner is on the Sunshine Hospital campus, east on Furlong Road. Put the mother's name on new baby flowers and get the ward number from her first. If the baby has gone to special care, send the flowers to her own ward instead. From what our florists have seen a special care nursery takes no flowers at all.

Nothing scented goes near a cot. People reach for something perfumed because it feels generous, and up there it is the quickest way to have the arrangement moved out to the corridor. I would send gerbera and lisianthus, in water, and keep the card short. "Welcome to the world, little one" gets read out loud at 2am and outlives the flowers by years.

You do not know how bad it is and asking feels like prying, so the flowers go and say it for you. They are either a small celebration or a way of standing next to somebody, and often the sender does not know yet which one they are sending. Yes, and every one of them leaves the suburb to do it. Kings Park has a bulk billing surgery on Kings Road and no hospital of its own, so get well flowers go east to the Sunshine campus on Furlong Road. Order once she has a bed, because a patient in emergency has no address inside the building yet. Full name and ward number both, and in our experience the desk will not give a stranger the ward. If the family is Vietnamese or Chinese, put it in the notes and the florist keeps chrysanthemum out of it. On the card, "You are in my thoughts" covers you when you do not know how serious it is.

Anna, qualified florist, on what a ward will keep

The wrapped bunch is the format I argued with people about most. It looks like more flowers for the money and it arrives as a job for a nurse with eleven other things on: find scissors, find a container, cut and fill. A hospital arrangement carries its own water and goes straight on the tray table. Allow another half hour to three hours from the desk to the bedside. Day two lands better than day one.

Flowers will not fix any of it and you already know that. They say the thing you cannot say from where you are standing, which is why the wrong ones sting. In these streets white carries Vietnamese, Catholic, Buddhist and Chinese practice, and a wreath on a stand is what most services here want, because it reads from the back of a room. A Vietnamese wake often runs at the family home for several days, so the address you are given may well be a house. If the family is Muslim, ask first, send to the house after the funeral, and keep flowers away from the mosque.

There are traditions in this postcode we have not been able to verify, including the Chin families from Myanmar. One question covers it: does the family have a preference. Ask the funeral director if you cannot ask them. Fifteen words on the card is plenty, and "Thinking of you and your family" has always been enough.

The chrysanthemum, then. Woody stem, robust petals, no soft tissue to collapse, which is why it holds through a hot chapel where a rose gives up. It is the correct flower on a Vietnamese, Chinese, Maltese or Italian grave, and the same stem on a birthday tray in one of those houses reads as a death notice. It is the one I watched people get wrong most. Tell the florist the occasion and let them pick the colour.

She lived here fifty years and now lives a few streets outside it. There is a line between reaching out and intruding, and from a distance you cannot see where it sits. Kalyna Care is over Taylors Road in Delahey, Grantham Green is on Magnolia Street in St Albans, and in our experience both take delivery at reception and carry it through themselves. The residents largely arrived in the 1960s and 70s, from Skopje, from Saigon, from Valletta, and what looks lovely to you may not be what she recognises. If you know where she came from, put it in the notes. If she has dementia and will not remember them by evening, send them anyway. Reason enough. Good ground for thinking of you or an eightieth. On the card, "Just wanted you to know I am thinking of you" asks nothing of her.

Anna, qualified florist, on what fits beside the bed

Small, front facing, and weighted so it cannot go over when the bed gets moved. Low scent, because in a shared room one resident's gift is everybody's. In a dementia wing keep it non toxic, so no foxglove and no bulbs. Carnation is what I would send. Waxy petals hold their water in a heated room and the buds keep opening into the second week.

That is fine. You do not need a category to send flowers. The first flower call I ever took, in the Kingscliff shop, a woman asked me three questions in a row and I had to tell her to hang on while I checked with my wife. So I put this one to Anna.

Carnation and alstroemeria, and I would leave them wrapped here. Plenty of the front doors here have somebody behind them on a weekday, so it goes in a jug within the hour. Cheap per stem, long per dollar. Two things undo it. Keep it off the fruit bench, because ethylene off a bowl of bananas curls carnation petals shut inside a day. And keep it off a north west sill in February, which is a heat source. Otherwise florist's choice gets what came in best.