Flowers to Medlow Bath, 569 Locals and One Grand Hotel

The family has a week of phone calls ahead of them and your flowers are one more thing on the table. Sort it before you order. The service runs out of Katoomba or Blackheath, because the town has no chapel and no funeral director of its own. The house on the highway is a separate gesture on a separate day. From what our florists have found, tribute flowers want to reach the director's rooms the day before, because the climb gets held behind fog. Stuck on the card? "Thinking of you and your family" has never once been wrong.

White is the safe answer and not always the right one. Most farewells up here are secular, and white for someone who walked the escarpment for thirty years says very little about them. Waratah in season, banksia and gum tie the flowers to the country they lived in. Where white is right, and for a Buddhist family it is, make it white or white and yellow with not one red stem. Red reads as celebration. Ask the family rather than guess.

Sympathy flowers to the home

Sending flowers into a hospital you cannot get to is a strange kind of helpless, and the thing that helps is getting the details right. Nobody from Medlow Bath is admitted in Medlow Bath. Blue Mountains District ANZAC Memorial Hospital serves the whole upper mountains, five kilometres down the highway, so a get well delivery is a short run. Wait until she has a ward before you order. In our experience flowers go to reception rather than the bedside, so the notes want a full name and a ward number.

Send a vase or a box, never a wrapped bunch. A ward keeps no spare vases, so paper means a nurse hunting for scissors and a container, and the job goes to the bottom of a long list. Skip the lilies too. The pollen travels on clothing between rooms and plenty of hospitals will not take them. Gerbera, chrysanthemum and carnation all pass. The trial work on surgical patients found the ones in rooms with flowers asked for fewer painkillers.

Most of what we send here goes to somebody's mum or dad, from a son or daughter in Sydney who cannot get up the hill this week. A seventieth nobody can drive to, or a thinking of you after a phone call you did not like the sound of. The luck is in the housing. Nearly every address here is a house of its own with a driveway and a porch, so an authority to leave genuinely works, which is not true in half the suburbs we cover. Ask for out of the wind, not out of sight.

Anna has one rule for a house nobody is home at.

Send a vase, not a wrapped bunch. Wrapped on a step here means a day in air that is freezing or wet and usually both, and the water pillow taped to the stems is the first thing to fail in the cold. A vase drinks the whole time it waits.

Everyone in that room sees them before they see you, which is why this order feels heavier than it should. An anniversary, a wedding, or the high tea somebody has been saving up for, at a hotel with the better part of a kilometre of frontage over the Megalong Valley. From what our florists have found, the Hydro Majestic takes flowers at the main entrance and the events staff carry them on, so the notes want the event name or the room. A surname on its own waits at a desk.

Anna on flowers that have to hold a function

Oriental lily is a fine thing to send to a house and the wrong thing to send to a function, and most people reach for it anyway. The scent fills a closed room by the second hour, and dry pollen stains white linen permanently. Lisianthus gives the same soft height with no scent and no pollen, and chrysanthemum still looks right at eleven at night after seven hours of heat and lighting. It is a long indoor carry from that entrance, so build it in water and keep the heads low enough to see over.

None of the four fitted, or all of them half did. When I was on the phones the slowest orders were never from people who did not care. They were from people who cared a great deal and had run out of confidence around the fourth photo, and the fix was always somebody telling them what to pick. So here is Anna telling you.

A mixed arrangement in a vase with chrysanthemum and lily through it. In a heated house that beats anything soft by a week and nobody has to hunt for scissors first. Going to the ward at Katoomba? Take the lily out and ask for gerbera. Or hand it over with Florist's Choice, from under $60.