Flowers to Mount Lofty, to the Right Hands in the Right Room

The family you are sending to is already carrying enough. You want the flowers to arrive without becoming one more thing anyone has to sort out, and that part you can leave with us. If part of you is wondering whether it is even your place to send, because you were not especially close, it is. Nobody at a funeral ever counted who was closest to whom.

Two gestures, both right, and worth keeping separate. Something to the family home in the first few days says you are thinking of them, and a wreath or sheath to the service is for the day itself. We hold service flowers to the funeral director's timing so they are at their best when people walk in, rather than waiting in a back room since dawn.

Anna, qualified florist

Mount Lofty is mostly older Australian and mainstream Christian or no religion, so white and soft tones read right at almost every service in the district, and there are no hard cultural avoids to trip over. If the family is doing a celebration of life rather than a formal funeral, that is where I would open it up, bold colour, natives, whatever the person actually loved. On the card, you do not have to find the perfect words. "Thinking of you and your family" carries it. Flowers will not fix the loss, and the family knows that as well as you do. They say the thing you cannot say from a distance, which is most of the point.

Hospital rooms and care-home bedside tables are small, and they are usually already carrying medical bits and a water jug. The flowers have to earn the space they take.

Sort out where first. A hospital ward down the range, a care-home room, and a recovery at home are three different deliveries, and the flowers sort the same way the setting does: bright and full if the news is good, softer and calmer if you are still waiting to hear. For a ward, from what our florists have seen the delivery goes to reception, the clerk logs it, and staff carry it to the bedside on their rounds. A full name and the ward or room on the get well order is what keeps it moving instead of stalling at the desk. In our early days near the Tweed, before there was a network, one of us ran these deliveries in person: first baby screaming in the back seat, thirty-seven degrees, five minutes to reach reception and nowhere to park. The name and the ward number were the difference between reaching the patient and circling the car park. So now we ask for them, every time.

Leave the oriental lilies out of a shared room. The pollen stains and the scent fills a whole ward, and the person in the next bed did not choose it. Same reason I would skip them for a shared care-home room. Go with a box arrangement, low and steady, in carnations or chrysanthemums, which hold for a fortnight and do not mind the dry air off a heater. That is also the format that survives a hospital delivery where there is no spare vase on the ward and no one has time to find one. The nearest big hospital, St Vincent's Private on Scott Street, is only a couple of kilometres down the range, so a ward delivery here is a short run for the florist, not a trek.

Mount Lofty runs older than the state average, and a good share of its birthdays are the big round numbers, a seventieth or an eightieth, often ordered by an adult child who lives somewhere else and cannot be in the room for it. There is something bittersweet in marking eighty years from a few hundred kilometres away, and the flowers close a little of that distance.

If it is going to a house, almost every address up here is a street-front home with a driveway, so a bright bunch on the doorstep is an easy win. If it is going to a care-home room, treat it more like the advice above. Anna would size it differently.

The instinct for a milestone is a big bright armful, and for a front door that is exactly right. For a resident's room I would bring it down and steady it, a seventieth birthday arrangement in a low box rather than a tall vase that tips, and stems the person knows on sight, roses, carnations, a bit of colour they can see from the bed. Familiar beats exotic in a room. It is a birthday, so it should still be cheerful, just built to live on a crowded bedside table rather than a dining table.

One question came up on the phones more than any other for a room like this: is it worth sending if she will not remember it by tomorrow? I always said yes. A bunch does its work the moment she sees it on the table, and again every time a nurse or a grandchild stops to say how lovely it is. It might mean more to you than it does to her. Send it anyway.

Plenty of orders do not land neatly in any of those three, and that is fine, from a graduation at the high school in the suburb come November to a thank-you for a nurse at the end of a hard week. If you tell us where it is going and roughly the mood, the florist takes it from there.

For a windy ridge-top address, or when you just want something that feels of the place, I would point you at Australian natives. Proteas, banksia, leucadendron. They shrug off a frosty morning and a gusty doorstep the way an imported rose never will, and they last. There is a reason the heritage rainforest pocket at Boyce Gardens and the native plantings in the Carnival gardens are half of what people here are proud of. For a suburb wrapped in bushland, natives are the choice that actually makes sense.