Send Same Day Flowers to Mayfield

It's their birthday and they might not even be home, because a lot of people in Mayfield work at the hospitals (hospital work is the biggest single industry here, going by the 2021 Census) and those shifts don't care whose birthday it is. Send the flowers to the house anyway, with their mobile in the notes. If nobody answers the door, the florist will generally ring that mobile and leave the bunch with a neighbour or somewhere in the shade. For a mate, start with our birthday flowers for a friend.

Anna's call: if the bunch has carnations in it, it wants to be nowhere near the fruit bowl. Ripening fruit gives off ethylene, the same gas that ripens the fruit, and carnations read that gas as the signal to finish, so the petals curl inside a day or two. Different room, longer life.

Mum's in care now and you can't get there this week. It's not the same as being there, and it still counts. Put the home (Uniting Irwin Hall on Section Street, say, Mayfield Aged Care on Crebert Street or Charles O'Neill Hostel on Wilson Street), her full name and her room number in the notes. In our experience a carer or reception walks the flowers through. Our thinking of you flowers are right for an ordinary week (pick one of the arrangements, so it's ready for the bedside table the minute it arrives), and there are 80th birthday flowers for a big birthday. On the card: "Thinking of you, Mum. See you soon."

One Oriental lily stem can fill a small, warm room with scent, and it gets stronger as each bud opens. If you don't know whether she'd love that, go roses or natives. They say it more quietly.

You've read the notice, so you have a time and a place. Both go in the notes: the White Lady Funerals chapel at 80 Maitland Road, St Columban's on Church Street or the graveside at Sandgate Cemetery, plus the start time, and in our experience the florist aims to have the flowers there before the family arrives. Funeral flowers go to the service, and sympathy flowers for the home can follow once the house goes quiet.

In 2008 I carried a sheaf into Sacred Heart on Main Street in Murwillumbah and saw, just as I set it down, that I'd spelled the surname on the card wrong (an extra letter, of all things), so I rewrote it on the back of one of our shop cards with a pen borrowed from the man doing the hymn books. A two-dollar card, and I'd have driven to Sydney to fix it if I'd had to. Families go through every card afterwards, and a family at St Columban's or the White Lady chapel is no different, so copy the name exactly as it's printed in the notice. "To all the family, with love and deepest sympathy" is plenty, with their surname spelled the way the notice spells it.

Anna, on the graveside

A tall vase on turf tips over in the first decent gust. A wreath lies flat and stays put, and the Wreath With Pink Tones is built for exactly that spot.

Some orders aren't a birthday, a care home or a funeral: a thank-you to the nurse at the Calvary Mater who looked after Dad, a new neighbour, a friend having a rotten month. Thank-you flowers and just because flowers cover most of them.

Anna's pick with no brief is the Lovely Lilac & Lime Bunch: soft enough for a thank-you, bright enough to lift a rotten month.