Flower Delivery Oak Flats Same Day

It's the birthday today and you're somewhere else. If Mum's birthday lunch or a 70th is at a club or a hall, the notes need the venue, the room and the birthday person's full name. At the house, the street address does the job.

I learnt that on a Saturday in 2007, carrying an 80th birthday arrangement into Cudgen Leagues Club in Kingscliff. Two function rooms, two parties, balloons at both. A very happy man at a 60th signed for it before anyone read the card. We had it on the right table before the cake came out.

Anna's call: for a party, send an arrangement. It arrives ready to stand among the plates, and a club kitchen is the last place anyone finds a vase.

Someone's in Shellharbour Hospital and you've got a ward name off a text, maybe. That ward name helps more than anything else you can add. In our experience flowers go to the ward desk and a nurse carries them in, so the ward in the notes saves a lap of the building. Due home soon? Send get well flowers to the house instead. A card that works: "Thinking of you. Get home soon."

Anna, on a hospital bedside

Bedside tables are tiny and the rooms tend to run warm. Go compact and low on scent, and pick hospital flowers that arrive in their own vase, since nobody on a ward has one spare. Gerberas shrug off the fruit bowl, but warm vase water is another matter. If the arrangement has gerberas, the water wants changing every day or two: bacteria breed fast in it, block the hollow stem, and the head folds over at the neck.

The notice is in the Mercury and the service is this week. For a service at H Parsons' Warilla chapel or Lakeside Memorial Park at Kanahooka, put the venue, the time and the full name of the person who has died in the notes, and choose funeral flowers made for a service. For the family, flowers at the house tend to land best once the visitors thin out. Flowers can't say much, and the family will still read every card, often more than once. On the card, "Thinking of you all, with love" is enough.

White and soft green sit quietly among the other tributes, and a white disbud chrysanthemum holds its shape from the morning delivery to the end of a long service. If the family has asked for a colour, use their colour.

Plenty of reasons to send flowers don't fit the cards above: a thank you, a sorry-I-went-quiet, a new job, or just because. Anna has a pick for those.

The Florist's Choice Bunch. At Salt, a florist's choice order meant I could reach for whatever looked strongest in the cool room that morning, with no colour scheme to chase, and those were always the bunches I was proudest of. With no theme to match, it's still the smartest way to buy a mixed bunch.