Flower Delivery Little Mountain QLD

You can't be there for the cake, and she isn't in the house she lived in for years any more. If she has her own villa in a retirement village, it's a front door and a kitchen bench; if she's in care, it's reception and a bedside table. Put which one in the notes, with her full name.

I learned about bedside tables in 2007, carrying an 80th birthday arrangement into Elouera, the nursing home on Kingscliff Street around the corner from our Marine Parade shop. The customer had picked the biggest one we did, and I was quite proud of it. The birthday girl said it was lovely, looked at her table, looked at me, and asked if I'd mind taking it to the dining room so she could still see the television. The whole corridor enjoyed it at lunch. A care room on Parklands Boulevard has a bedside table too.

Anna, on what fits beside the reading glasses

For a 90th, go low and familiar: roses, daisies, the sort of flowers she'd have grown herself, in a box that sits beside her glasses without crowding them. Keep the scent soft. In a small room with the door shut, perfume builds all afternoon, and she can't walk away from it.

The baby's here, you've seen one photo, and you don't know if they're still on the ward or already home.

Home is the safer bet. A new mum leaving hospital already has the bag, the car seat and the baby to carry, and from what our florists see, flowers make one thing too many. Send new baby flowers to the house, pick the day after they're due home at checkout, and put a mobile in the notes in case everyone's asleep.

Anna's call: nothing that sheds, nothing with a big scent, and nothing that needs fussing, because new parents aren't changing vase water. Soft blue or pale pink in a box, roses or gerberas. Oriental lilies are gorgeous, and their scent fills a whole house; send those when the baby's a month old.

Thirteen years of school are done, and you're watching the formal photos come through on your phone from somewhere else.

Send the graduation flowers to the house. School flowers tend to wait at the front office, and on the last day of Year 12 the kids have signed each other's shirts and gone before anyone thinks to collect them. Aim for the day after, when they're home and sleeping in.

Anna, on gerberas that keep their heads up

Bright gerberas suit an eighteen-year-old down to the ground. The stem is hollow (florists call it a scape), and once the water pressure inside drops, the head folds at the neck. The florists I trained with ran a fine wire up the inside of every one. Wired, they hold their heads up on the kitchen bench well into the next week.

Plenty of orders don't fit a heading: the neighbour who drove Mum to her appointments, a friend's first week in a new house, a thank-you that's overdue.

Send an arrangement in its own box. It sits on a care-room table, a kitchen bench buried in baby things or a teenager's desk, and nobody has to hunt for a vase. The foam is a sponge: soaked right through before the stems go in, it feeds every one of them for days, and a splash from a cup when the box feels light keeps it going. Pick the colour and leave the stems to the florist.