Flowers Delivered to Mount Victoria, Up From the East

You are arranging flowers for a funeral from somewhere else, and you want them in the right place at the right time without having to ask a stranger the obvious questions.

There are two different orders here. Flowers for the service at St Peter's, the old sandstone church on the rise, go to the funeral director or the church with the service date on them, not to the house. A graveside piece for the town cemetery, which has been on the edge of the village since the 1880s, works the same way, timed to the service rather than left at a door. Flowers for the family go to the home. Mount Victoria has no funeral home of its own, so from what our florists find it pays to confirm the venue before the run, and to allow the day either side that a small mountain town tends to need.

Anna, qualified florist

More than half this town ticks no religion on the census, so a lot of these are a celebration of a life, not a white lily service. There is no rulebook for those. White is safe, but it is not compulsory, and often the colours the person actually loved say more, the bushwalker's waratahs, a gardener's own roses. In the cold those stems hold beautifully, and a native sheaf or chrysanthemums will still look right a week after everyone has gone home. On the card, plain does the work: thinking of you and your family is enough.

The most common order we get is not for an occasion at all. It is a Sydney son or daughter thinking of a parent who is getting older in a cold house on a quiet street, through a winter you cannot drive up for as often as you would like.

The one thing worth getting right is the house. A quarter of the homes here sit empty midweek, so if there is any chance nobody is in, leave an authority to drop and a safe spot in the notes, and put your own number down. A boxed arrangement in its own water will keep happily on a cold porch until someone gets home. A hand-tied bunch would rather not.

For a house that might be empty till evening, I would always box it and pick stems that do not sulk about it. Chrysanthemums, carnations, a few natives through the middle. They will still be standing when the door finally opens. Keep the scent gentle too, since a closed up cold room holds a heavy fragrance far longer than you would think.

The birthdays that come up this mountain are mostly the big ones. A seventieth or an eightieth, for a parent or an old friend who has been in the village a long time and is not making the trip down for it.

You are not at the table, so the flowers stand in for you. With an older person in a quiet house, what matters is that they last, not that they turn up in a grand rush. From what we see, a milestone bunch still going strong a fortnight later does more than a bigger one spent by the weekend.

Anna has a view on which way to spend the money.

For a seventieth or an eightieth I would put it into fewer, better stems, not a bigger bunch of soft ones. A tight arrangement of natives, or a few good roses out of a cool room, will outlast a big mixed bunch by a week, and it takes up less of a small side table, which counts for more than people think in a smaller home.

If someone in Mount Victoria has landed in hospital, it is almost always the Blue Mountains ANZAC over in Katoomba, twenty odd kilometres east, and you are sending from further away still. We ran these hospital deliveries ourselves in the early days, a baby in the back of the car and the clock against us, so the nerves in a hospital order are not lost on us.

The one call worth making is whether they are still admitted. Mountain hospital stays can be short, so if there is any chance they are already home, a get well bunch to the house is the easier delivery. If they are on a ward, put their full name and the ward in the notes, not just the hospital.

Anna on hospital flowers

From what our florists see, flowers go to the main reception and a ward clerk carries them through, which can take anywhere from half an hour to a few hours, so order once they are on a ward and not while they are still in emergency. Skip the lilies. The pollen travels, the scent is not yours to inflict on the next bed, and plenty of wards knock them back anyway. A compact vase or a box, not a hand-tied bunch, since the ward has no spare vase to stand it in. And it is not fussing: there are trials where patients with flowers in the room asked for fewer painkillers and sat with lower blood pressure than those without. On the card, keep it simple: thinking of you, hope you are on the mend.

A good number of orders up here are a welcome, not a condolence. A friend has taken the mountain house for the weekend, or just bought one, and you want something on the kitchen table when they walk in on Friday night.

The catch is the same as the empty parent house. The place may be shut up and unaired since the last visit, so the flowers want to handle a day or two alone before anyone arrives. A few of the guesthouses, Closeburn House among them, sit up steep drives that hold frost of a morning, so on a cold day the run waits for the road to clear. Tell us roughly when they are getting there and the florist works back from it.

I would not send the soft florist window bunch to a house nobody has warmed up yet. Dense wet blooms can spot if they sit shut in a damp, unaired room for days. Something open and simple, natives or a firm petalled mix, walks into that Friday night arrival looking like you meant it. And the cold keeps it going long after the weekend does.

One thing peculiar to this town. In June and July this is Yulefest country, when the stone guesthouses like Hotel Etico and the Victoria and Albert run full Christmas dinners in the cold. A table arrangement for one of those, or for a friend doing their own Christmas in July, is a Christmas flowers order that lands in winter, which is the one place in the country where that makes literal sense.

If none of those is quite your situation, or you just want something good at the door, here is where I would point you.

The two Florists Choice bunches are the sensible call, and not only because this is not a big spending town. It hands the florist the freedom to build from whatever came up the highway strongest that morning, which in a cold room is going to outlast a fixed list of stems anyway. Tell them the mood, happy or gentle, and let them work. A decent bunch of chrysanths will give you the better part of three weeks in a cold room, which is the value pick nobody expects. If the budget is the thing, the under $60 range does more than you would expect when the cold is doing half the work.