Flowers Delivered to Mount Riverview, and Off the Ridge

You are not going to be at the table. Most fiftieths we send to this postcode look like that, because the people turning fifty here bought in the seventies and eighties and never left, while the kids went down the hill or interstate. Four in ten of these houses are owned outright. Nobody is going anywhere.

A fiftieth here tends to be a house full of people at six in the evening, not a quiet morning drop. Our florists find the best window is late morning, before the afternoon runs stack up, so the 50th birthday flowers are already on the table when the first car pulls in. If the house is empty until five, say so in the notes and the driver leaves it in the porch shade, off the front step. For a mother turning fifty, the birthday flowers for mum range is the narrower place to start.

Anna, qualified florist

For a fiftieth there is a real choice between a tall vase build and a low table arrangement, and it comes down to where the thing ends up. A tall build is for a hallway or a sideboard where it is not in anyone's eyeline. If it is going on the table people eat at, it needs to finish under eye level, or it gets moved to the bench within the hour and spends the whole party facing a wall. Low and wide. Chrysanthemums and carnations carry that shape properly and at the temperature these houses sit at, they are still going a fortnight after everyone has gone home.

Somebody you cannot get to is in a bed nine kilometres east of the house you were about to send to. Nobody from Mount Riverview goes to hospital in Mount Riverview. It is Nepean at Kingswood, down the M4, and it takes the maternity and general wards for this whole stretch of the lower mountains.

From what our florists have seen, flowers go to main reception rather than the ward, and staff move them through from there when the round allows. So the order needs the patient's full name and the ward, not the name of the hospital, and we ask for both at checkout for that exact reason. Send on day two. Day one after an admission or a birth is chaos and the flowers get put on a windowsill and forgotten. Day two, somebody actually looks at them. If it is a day procedure, send it to the house instead. We have watched too many hospital flower deliveries chase a patient who was already home by three. Keep the card short too. Something like "thinking of you, hope you are out soon" reads better at a bedside than a paragraph does. For a recovery back at the house, the get well flowers range is the right shelf.

The format question matters more here than anywhere else on this page. Anna has a rule about it.

A hospital room has no vase and no one spare to find one. A hand-tied bunch delivered to a ward stays in its wrapping until a visitor brings a container, which can be two days, and it spends that whole time drinking out of a sealed bag the size of a fist. Send something already in water. Skip oriental lilies too. The pollen is airborne, it marks the linen, and the scent fills a room with no window worth opening. It is also why the oncology wards are stricter than the general ones. Pollen travels on staff clothing between rooms, so a patient with no flowers of their own still ends up breathing somebody else's. And they are worth sending, whatever the ward. There is a randomised trial, ninety surgical patients, where the ones recovering in a room with flowers in it needed fewer painkillers and ran lower blood pressure than the ones without. Ninety-three per cent said they would pick that room again, against seventy-three in the bare ones. Ninety patients, randomised, published.

A lot of the orders to this postcode come from adult children who live somewhere else. Sydney, the Cumberland Plain below, sometimes another state entirely. The parent bought here in the eighties, stayed, and now lives on a big block with a long driveway in a suburb that has no shops to walk to and no bus worth catching.

Some of those parents are still in the house. Some have moved two kilometres down the hill, or eight west to Springwood, into a room with a bedside table and not much surface. Either way the order works the same: tell us which, and give us the room number if there is one. The room number is what we end up ringing back for most often, because a surname on its own does not always get past a busy reception. Deliveries to care go to reception rather than the room, and staff carry them through. No reason required, and no occasion either, which is the whole point of thinking of you flowers. The gesture is the message. Keep the card short as well. "Just thinking of you today" does more work than a paragraph explaining why you have not visited.

If the flowers are going into a care room, do not send a bunch. Care staff do not have time to change vase water twice a week, and a hand-tie in a jug on a shared bedside table is the arrangement that gets moved to a windowsill. Send something in foam that stays flat and will not tip. Keep it small and front-facing so it fits alongside the glasses and the photos and the medication. And if the person is in a dementia ward, send something they would recognise from their own garden. Roses, daisies, a bit of lavender. Familiar beats impressive every time in that room.

Teacher flowers are the order people most often talk themselves out of, because they decide a small bunch will read as an afterthought. It does not. The public school on the hill opened in 1971 and its motto is Honour Above All, which is the sort of thing that stays with a family long after the kids have left. Between that school, Blaxland High down on Coughlan Road and Wycliffe over at Warrimoo, a lot of households on this ridge run to the same December deadline.

Our florists send more of these in the first fortnight of December than in the whole of November, most of them under sixty dollars, and almost all of them go to the front office rather than the classroom. The thank you flowers range covers it, and the flowers under $60 shelf is where most of these actually come from.

I would not ask a florist for anything soft in December. It is the back end of the season, the market is thinning out, and a thin petal has already had a hard week before it reaches a bench. What is genuinely good in a Blue Mountains December is what grows out the back here: Christmas bush colouring up, the woody natives still holding, gerberas if they came in that morning. A native build in December is the strongest thing on the bench that week. It also happens to cost less.

Plenty of orders have no occasion attached to them. Somebody had a hard week. Somebody has been on your mind since the last fire season and you have not rung. You do not need a category before you are allowed to send anything. Nor do you need to know the first thing about flowers. The first phone call I ever took about flowers, back in the Kingscliff shop in 2007, I got three quick questions and answered all of them with "hang on, I will just check with my wife." Siobhan knew about as much as I did.

For a Mount Riverview address I would take a mixed seasonal build over anything single-flower. A mixed build fades in stages, and in a house at this altitude the stages run long. The gerberas start going around day eight or nine, the roses open right out and finish near a fortnight, and the chrysanthemums and carnations are still upright at three weeks. The person receiving it gets three different arrangements out of one delivery. Nobody remembers the technique, by the way. They remember the colour and how long it kept going, so build for those two and the rest is decoration. The Florists Choice Bright Mixed Bunch at $79.95 is the one I would point at, and it lands right in the middle of what this suburb actually spends. Browse the rest of the mixed flowers, or hand it over to florists choice and let whoever is on the bench read the market that morning.