Same-Day Flower Delivery to McKellar, Six Days a Week

It's their birthday, maybe a big one like a seventieth, and they'll be at work or minding the grandkids until late. McKellar is almost all houses, so if nobody's in, the flowers wait at the house for them. Name the spot in the notes, the carport, the side gate or behind the screen door, somewhere out of the sun, and add a mobile. Start with our seventieth birthday flowers, or our bestselling birthday flowers for any other year. Anna has a view on milestone bunches.

A big birthday bunch sits on the dining table for as long as the cards keep coming, so pick for staying power. Carnations and chrysanthemums hold two to three weeks in a room around twenty degrees. Roses hold about a week, longer if they sit out of direct sun.

Someone's in North Canberra Hospital or Calvary Bruce Private, on the same Mary Potter Circuit campus, and you have a ward number off a text. In our experience the flowers go to the front desk and staff take them up, so put the full name and the ward in the notes, and hold off if they're in ICU. Hospital flowers suit the ward; get well flowers suit the patient once they're back home. Card idea: Get home soon. The garden's waiting.

In 2007 Siobhan and I delivered the shop's orders ourselves. Murwillumbah Hospital, 37 degrees, Asha screaming in the baby seat, five minutes to reach reception and no park. Reception read the ward off the docket and sent the flowers up. North Canberra Hospital is a much bigger building, and in our experience it works the same way, which is why the ward in the notes matters.

Anna, on what suits a ward

Send a box or a vase. In my experience a ward has no spare vases, and a wrapped bunch can sit at the desk for hours waiting for one. The Blissful Botanics Arrangement turns up ready for the bedside table, and natives carry next to no scent into a shared room.

The funeral notice gives a chapel and a time, and you're sending from somewhere else. On Nettlefold Street in Belconnen, William Cole Funerals, with its Bluegum Chapel, is at number 60, and White Lady Funerals is at 101. Put the funeral home, the street number and the time in the notes. For Norwood Park in Mitchell or a Mass at St Monica's in Evatt, give the venue and the time. Funeral flowers go to the service; sympathy flowers for the home land better in the week after. Card idea: With love, and with you all this week.

A sheath, like the White Lily & Rose Sheath, is built to lie flat, so it sits on or beside the casket with no vase and nobody needing to water it. For the family's lounge room, send an arrangement that carries its own water. White and cream sit right at most services, but ask first if the family keeps a tradition with its own colours.

You know the person, but not where the flowers will end up.

Anna's pick: the Lovely Lilac & Lime Bunch. It's built around lisianthus and roses, and lisianthus looks expensive, carries almost no scent and gives ten days or more in an ordinary lounge room. The bunch sits as well on a kitchen bench as on a desk or a sideboard, and purple and green read right for a birthday, a thank-you or a sympathy visit, so it can't send the wrong message.