Mount Waverley Flowers, and Why Winter Suits Them

The room is already full. Visitors, a feed every two hours, paperwork mislaid on the trolley. Reception needs her full name and the ward, not just a surname, because hospitals, in our experience, will not tell a florist where a patient is sleeping. Ring the switchboard first if you do not have the ward.

Main reception, a ward clerk carries it up, a nurse puts it on the table. Half an hour to three, in our florists' experience. I did that run myself around Murwillumbah for a couple of years, Asha screaming in the back, five minutes to find a park in thirty seven degrees. Order once she has a ward, and if the baby has gone to special care, wait until they are both back on it. Keep the card short. Somebody tired reads it out loud.

Anna, qualified florist

A hand tied bunch on a ward is a job handed to the staff. No spare vase, no scissors, and nobody on that floor with the time to go hunting for one. Send a box or a vase. Skip the lilies, and the reason is mechanical, not fussy: the pollen sits exposed on the stamens, goes airborne and rides room to room on a sleeve, which is why Epworth publish a written ban across every one of their hospitals. Peace lilies and orchids are not Lilium and are fine, but no potted plants: the soil is the problem, never the plant. New baby arrangements built low leave the bedside table usable.

You have not been in for a while and you know roughly how long. Distance does that to families, and the flowers are not an apology. They are a way of being in the room on a day you cannot get to it.

Before anything else, check the facility name on the order is the one your mother is actually in. Five aged care addresses sit inside this postcode and one opened this year. Independent living units get delivered like houses; residential care goes to reception. Two run secure dementia wings. The stem list narrows there. Put the date of your last visit, or your next one, in the card message. Of everything in the box that is the part she will want. An eightieth or ninetieth here is an ordinary week, and so is no occasion at all.

Non toxic species only in a dementia room. Residents may try to eat flowers or drink the vase water, so no oleander, no lily of the valley, no foxglove, nothing from a bulb. Roses, daisies, lavender, something she would know from her own garden. An exotic can puzzle her. Small and front facing for a bedside table that already carries glasses and medication, in foam or a box, because nobody on that floor is changing water twice a week. Low fragrance too, in a shared room.

Colour carries more weight in this postcode than in most, and it is the second decision, not the first. Funeral or family home comes before it. Two gestures, two addresses. Just under forty percent ticked no religion at the last census, and for those families a white-only wreath is usually the last thing wanted. More than a quarter of the suburb has Chinese ancestry, where white and yellow are correct and red is not sent at all. The two can be four streets apart.

Eastern Orthodox is another six percent, and there the wreath goes to the church rather than the funeral home, circular and white, at the entrance about three quarters of an hour before the family walks in, then again at forty days, three months, six months and a year. So ask. One line does it: does the family have any cultural or religious preferences for the flowers. Early April the pattern shifts again and yellow and white chrysanthemums start going down to Springvale for Qingming, cut for a graveside, not a sideboard.

I ran flowers into hospitals and funeral homes around the Tweed and the northern Gold Coast for a couple of years from 2007, and what I got wrong early was the timing. Early is invisible, during is not. On the card, short outlasts eloquent, and thinking of you and your family is enough.

Chrysanthemums are cemetery flowers in two houses on this street. Chinese and Italian, and in both they are exactly right at a funeral and an insult on a birthday table. I used to be sniffy about them, mostly snobbery, and fifteen years fixed that: ethylene insensitive, eighteen to thirty days in a cool room, the toughest thing on the bench. If the family is Hindu the garlands are theirs to arrange and flowers are not the gesture. A vegetarian hamper to the house, no onion and no garlic, lands better.