Flowers Delivered to Montmorency, Ward, Room or Porch

Flowers do not fix any of this. You already know that. You are sending them anyway, from wherever you happen to be, because it is the one thing that can be done today.

If it was sudden, you are picking in shock and the honest advice is to pick fast and not agonise. If you have had weeks to see it coming, you have room to get it right. Either way there are two places they can go. Flowers to the house usually land inside the first three days and they often sit better once the crowd has thinned out and the family is on their own again. Service flowers go to the funeral director, and in our experience the funeral home wants the confirmed service date, which can fall well after the death. One phone call to them settles it. Keep the card short while you are at it: "Thinking of you and your family" carries more than a paragraph does. Write it like it will be kept, because it usually is. The flowers go in the bin after a fortnight and the card ends up in a drawer for years.

Anna, qualified florist

For a service, a funeral arrangement is built on a base so it holds its shape being carried in and out of a car. A hand-tied bunch reaches the chapel looking tired. For the house, send something in its own vessel, because nobody there is hunting for scissors this week. Two things people get caught by around here. St Francis Xavier is a Catholic parish, and in Italian tradition chrysanthemums are the flowers of the dead, which makes them right for a funeral and completely wrong as a get-well gift the following month. And if the person walked the Diamond Creek trail every weekend, say so when you order. Wattle, grevillea, banksia, flowers that grew in the same hills they walked, will mean more than a white bunch that could have gone anywhere.

It has been longer between visits than you meant it to be, and the reasons all being good ones does not help much at eleven o'clock at night when you are thinking about it. And if she is far enough into dementia that she may not know who sent them, the flowers might mean more to you than to her. That is okay. Send them anyway. The card goes up on the bedside and the staff read it to her, and that lands somewhere even when the name does not.

Every one of the homes ringing this suburb is in a different postcode to hers, so the order wants the facility name written out and not just the street. From what our florists have seen, flowers go to reception and get walked through the same day. A short card does more than a long one, and "Thinking of you, we will be up soon" is enough, as long as you mean the second half.

What to actually put in it is where people get it wrong, so I will hand over to Anna.

Everyone sends the exotic thing. Do not. If she is eighty-eight and living with dementia, the flowers that land are the ones she recognises from her own garden: roses, daisies, lavender, sweet peas if it is winter. A stem she has never seen before can land as confusing, which defeats the whole exercise. Keep it low, keep it stable so it survives the bed being wheeled past, and skip anything with a heavy scent if she is sharing the room. A carnation will go two to three weeks in there without anyone changing the water, which matters when the staff have forty other people to get to. Small is not the same as cheap in a room that size. A compact posy that fits the bedside table reads as considered; the big one gets moved to a windowsill she cannot see from the bed.

Back in 2007 I used to do the hospital runs myself, with Asha screaming in the back of the car and five minutes to get the flowers to reception at Murwillumbah and nowhere to park, and I have never once forgotten what that felt like. This is the bit you can actually do from where you are.

Two things get orders stuck. The first is timing. Wait until she has been given a ward. Flowers sent while someone is still in emergency, or in theatre, tend to sit at the front desk with nobody's name on them. The second is the address line, because a switchboard will not hand out a room location, so a full patient name plus a ward is what gets it to the bedside. From what our florists have seen at the Austin and the Mercy, it goes to the ward reception desk and travels through on the next round. And if she is in intensive care, oncology or haematology, hold off entirely. Those wards do not take cut flowers anywhere we have delivered, and it is worth knowing that before you spend the money on it.

A wrapped bunch is the wrong format for a ward. There is no spare vase on a hospital floor and no staff member has time to find one, so it sits in its cellophane until a visitor solves it. Hospital flowers in a vessel go straight onto the tray table. Keep the scent down for a shared room. If you do not know how bad it is, and plenty of people ordering do not, go bright for good news and softer for uncertain. Two or three words on the card is plenty: "thinking of you today" does the job without needing to know the diagnosis. If she loves lilies, ask for pollen-free Asiatics: same look, no fragrance, and no orange pollen going through the ward on somebody's uniform. There is also a randomised trial of ninety surgical patients where the ones recovering in rooms with flowers used fewer painkillers and had lower blood pressure. That is a clinical result, and it is the reason I stopped calling this a nice gesture.

You do not need a category to send flowers. A birthday you forgot counts, and so does a Tuesday where somebody is having a rough one.

If you want it decided for you, send natives. Here is the part nobody mentions: most of the roses in a standard mixed bunch flew here from Colombia or Kenya before they ever crossed Australia, and they are perfectly good, but they have used up some of their life getting here. Natives are grown here. Correa, grevillea and banksia are adapted to the same dry shade this suburb runs on, they will go a fortnight where an imported rose gives you a week, and they suit a bloke as easily as anyone else. They also look like the hills the suburb is built into, which on a page about Montmorency is not the worst reason to pick something.