Lakes Entrance Flower Delivery

Flowers do not fix this and you already know it. What they do is stand in the room you cannot get to. Condolences head to the house in the first few days. Flowers for the service go to the funeral director, with the service date and who they are for. Send those to the family's street and they land after everyone is inside. No fixing that tomorrow. I carried tributes into funeral homes around the Tweed and the southern Gold Coast for four years, and every director took them at the back door, never the front. Asha on my hip got me through more of those doors than my name did. Where a family has a connection to the Lake Tyers community we ask first, because every community handles it differently.

A tall standing tribute is wrong for an ashes wall. A lawn grave, a monumental plot and a memorial wall each take a different shape of tribute, and the cemetery on Palmers Road runs more than one. Ask the family which section. Small, weighted and front facing covers you when nobody is sure. If the card is the part you are stuck on, thinking of you and your family has never once been wrong.

Four hours each way is a day gone, and the day is not always there. She is fine, and that is the awkward part, because nothing has happened and it has still been a while. Three aged care and retirement addresses in a town of five thousand, all taking flowers at reception. Give us the resident and the facility, and staff carry it through from there. Thinking of you beats get well when nothing is wrong, and the birthday that keeps coming up is an eightieth.

A box for a room, every time. No vase to find, no water for staff to change, nothing to go over when the door swings. Keep the scent down: in a shared room one resident's oriental lilies belong to everybody. On a dementia wing ask for familiar and non-toxic, because residents do sometimes taste the flowers or drink the water. Roses, daisies, lavender.

Ordering into a hospital you have never walked into is its own kind of helpless. The base hospital for the shire is forty kilometres west, so a get well order addressed to Lakes Entrance has nowhere to land. Patient and ward on the order. I did those runs myself out of the Kingscliff shop, 2006 to 2010. Murwillumbah Hospital, thirty-seven degrees, Asha screaming in the back and nowhere to park, and the flowers still went to reception for a clerk to log. Someone on staff walks them the last hundred metres, and it worked that way at every ward I ever carried into. If discharge is close, send it to the house.

Anna, qualified florist

Wait until they reach a general ward. Intensive care, high dependency, oncology and haematology tend not to take flowers, and one sent early sits at reception with nobody able to place it. Palliative is the exception, and the staff there know why. On a general ward, skip lilies and heavy scent and send it boxed, because a ward has no spare vase.

None of those three fits. Fair enough.

Go natives. Protea, banksia, leucadendron. The waxy cuticle barely registers a warm coastal night and they hold shape on a doorstep longer than anything in the bucket. Expect a protea to drink hard, and its leaves to darken as the head pulls sugar out of them. Normal.