She's in Port. You're not. Most of what we send into Port comes from four hours away, so the florist works off your delivery notes, not off knowing the house. Ward desks at the Base, rooms on Ocean Drive, funeral homes on Gordon Street. You are at none of them. Lynette sent her mum's birthday flowers to Port and wrote that she loved them (read her review below). We've owned Lily's Florist since 2009, and Port was one of the first towns we sent flowers to. Order before 2pm and it is at her door this afternoon.

A real customer review
"My sister received beautiful fresh flowers at exactly the time I'd requested and absolutely made her day. I loved that this was a local business as I know my sister really values the port Macquarie community and likes to shop local whenever possible so I could make her happy in 2 ways"
Lara, NSW, verified customer
Thanks so much. I did not grow up in Port Macquarie, I grew up down in Taree, but I spent more or less every weekend up there as a kid, driving up to my grandmother's with the family. She had an apartment opposite Shelly Beach that felt enormous to me back then. So a review from someone who loves the town the way your sister does means something particular to me.
Let me be straight with you about one thing, because you clearly care about it. Lily's is a family business, but it is run from the Tweed, not Port Macquarie. What I can tell you is that your sister's flowers were made by a florist in the town itself, one we have worked with since 2008. So the part you hoped for, hands in Port Macquarie putting those gerberas together for her, that part was real. You did get to do both things at once.
Made her day and arrived when you asked is the lovely result on top. Good to have been a small part of it, for her and for the town.
Siobhan & Andrew, Lily's Florist
Same day means ordered by 2pm on a weekday, 10am Saturdays. It is a bench and run window, not an office rule: the arrangement is made that morning and it goes out on that day's run.
Four kinds of address cover most of it. Ward desks at Port Macquarie Base, aged care along Sherwood Road and Ocean Drive, the funeral homes clustered on Gordon Street, and houses across the whole Hastings.
Warm humid air roughly doubles a flower's respiration for every ten degrees, so it ages faster. A rose that holds ten days in a cool room can be down to three or four on a humid verandah.
There is no Sunday delivery anywhere in the Hastings. That is a stock decision rather than a service gap: the markets shut Saturday afternoon, so a Sunday bunch would be built from Friday's stock.
The Hastings River and the low routes can flood, and the North Shore ferry can stop running. Neither is common, both are real, and both are solved by ordering earlier in the day when rain is about.
We have no shop in Port Macquarie. The order goes to a partner florist in or close to the town, with the stems and the bench space that day. That is the trade, and the next section sets it out in full.
The line at the top of this page
You have already read that your flowers are delivered by a partner florist. On its own that line tells you nothing about whether it is good news or bad news. Here is the rest of it.
We have never had a shop in Port Macquarie. We have a flower shop in Kingscliff, four hours north, and a network of partner florists we have been building since 2009. Your order goes to one of them, in or close to Port Macquarie, as a paid job rather than a lead. They buy their own stock, they build your arrangement in their own shop, and it goes out on their own run.
You cannot walk in and point at a bucket. You do not get to hand-pick the stems, meet the person making it, or change your mind at the counter. If that matters to you, a shop you can drive to beats us on it, and there are good ones in Port.
Your order stops depending on one shop's Tuesday. Closed for a funeral, out of white stock the week everyone wants white, short-staffed before Mother's Day, and the order moves to another bench. A single shop in that position can only ring you and apologise.
Redundancy is worth more in a regional town than a capital. Sydney has hundreds of florists inside ten kilometres. The Hastings has a handful covering a catchment from Kempsey down to the Camden Haven, across a river with a ferry on it, through a wet season that closes low roads most years. Cover matters most exactly where it is thinnest.
What we do about it is unglamorous. The order goes out paid, so nobody is deciding whether it is worth their morning. The phone is answered by us, 7am to 6pm weekdays, on 1300 360 469. If something is wrong we want a photograph the same day, front and back, because a substituted stem is fixable on the day and almost never a week on.
That is the whole arrangement. It has not really changed since 2009.
Port Macquarie Has One of the Best Climates in Australia. In February, It Works Against the Flowers You Send There.
People move to Port Macquarie for the climate, and they are right to. Mild winters, you can swim most of the year. None of that helps a flower in February. Warm wet air does two things at once: it speeds the flower's metabolism up, which roughly doubles for every ten degrees, so it burns through its vase life faster, and it leaves grey mould sitting in the still air, waiting for a tight-petalled rose to open. I learned to read it off the stem. A rose that gives you ten good days in a cool Hobart living room gives you three or four on a humid Port verandah.
The brown edges people read as bruising on a sticky week are usually Botrytis, mould, and a florist who wraps a bunch tight in that air is handing you grey fuzz by the morning. Pull the affected outer petals and the inner bloom is fine, but you will not be there to do it, and you will not be there to move the vase out of the afternoon sun either. So in a Port summer I steer hard toward the stems that look after themselves. Chrysanthemums and carnations, and the natives, banksia and leucadendron and protea. Chrysanthemum is the one I would put money on: it is the most temperature-resilient commercial stem there is and it does not react to ethylene at all.
Which brings up the thing nobody thinks about. Ethylene is the gas ripening fruit gives off, and carnations, waxflower and delphinium are very sensitive to it. A fruit bowl on the same bench in a warm kitchen can curl a carnation inside a day. Different room is safe, same room is not. And the fragile pretty things, hydrangeas and sweet peas, save those for a July order when the cool holds them for you. A sweet pea in a summer draught can go from a week to under two days.
The cutoff is 2pm on weekdays and 10am Saturdays. For some of these the cutoff is not the thing that decides it, so this is the deadline behind the deadline.
You will not be standing there to see whether it made it, which is why the margin is worth more than the money.
Six kinds of address, six different answers. Pick the one you are sending to.
The Base is the hospital the whole Hastings comes to, which is why so much of what we send into this postcode is headed for a ward desk rather than a house. In our experience flowers go to the main reception rather than the bedside, and staff carry them up from there.
The thing people get wrong is the address line. Without the patient's full name and the ward, the bunch waits unclaimed at the front counter while your person is two floors up. From what our florists have seen, the intensive care and cancer wards tend not to take flowers at all, so if that is where they are, send to the house instead and let it be waiting.
Aged care is one of the easier places to deliver to, easier than a hospital. It is her home now, and from what we see the staff welcome flowers. They go to reception and somebody walks them to her room.
The one that catches people out is the gated retirement estates, where a keypad and no code means a wasted trip. A gate code or a mobile number for someone on site in the delivery notes solves it before it happens. Keep the arrangement small and the scent low, especially in a shared room, because what is lovely to one person is a headache to the woman in the next bed.
Port Macquarie's funeral homes sit close together on Gordon Street, so that run is a short one and well known to the florists who cover the town. Tributes for a service go to the funeral home or the church, not to the family.
Timing is the part that matters and it is tighter than people expect. Aim to have it arrive forty-five minutes to an hour before things begin, and in our experience the funeral director takes it from there. A tribute that lands during the service has nowhere to go.
A condolence arrangement goes to the family home rather than the service, to sit on the kitchen bench in the quiet days after, when the crowd has gone and the house is loud with nobody in it. Same address type as a birthday, entirely different job.
Nobody home is the ordinary risk here, and a west-facing verandah in a Port summer is not a good place to spend an afternoon. A note about a sheltered spot, or a mobile number for someone who can take it in, is worth more than anything else you can put in the delivery instructions.
Not all of Port Macquarie is on the town side of the river. The North Shore is reached by ferry, and in the wet season that ferry can stop running, which is the one genuine access problem this town has.
It is not common and it is not a reason to send somewhere else. It is a reason to order earlier in the day when rain is about, so there is room in the afternoon to try again rather than the whole thing landing on tomorrow.
The towns around Port route through the same florists and the same day's run, which is why the Base draws patients from all of them and why a Port order and a Wauchope order are not really different jobs.
The difference is distance on the run, so the cutoff is the same but the margin behind it is thinner. Each of these towns has its own page with its own detail, and they are linked at the bottom of this one.
You will not see which of these it was. That is the part we are standing in for.
You have probably ordered from a flower site before that turned out to be a middleman, forwarding the job to whichever florist came up cheapest that day. There is none of that here, and it is the difference the whole arrangement rests on. The order is placed paid, at a price agreed in advance, with a florist we have worked with for years rather than one found this morning.
You have seen what is on the bench. The flowers are the easy part. Matching them to the moment is where people get stuck, and the moments that bring people to a page like this are rarely the happy ones. Port marks them out loud, all the same. The painted rocks along the breakwall are a whole town's worth of births and deaths and anniversaries, set down by the water where everyone walks, and flowers belong to that same register. A fair few orders are thank-yous from families for the people who did the caring.
Ordering flowers when someone has died is one of those things you do on autopilot, in the gaps between phone calls you did not want to make. You are not really in a state to be comparing bunches.
There are two gestures here and they go to two places. A tribute for the service goes to the funeral home or the church. A condolence arrangement goes to the family's home. The router above has the timing for each.
White is the safe ground for sympathy here and most families lean that way, though soft pastels are fine and red is the one I would think twice about. Port is an older, churchgoing town, Anglican and Catholic mostly, so service flowers run fairly traditional, sprays and wreaths over anything modern. If the family is Italian, chrysanthemums carry real meaning at a funeral, which is exactly why you never send them as a cheer-up gift to an Italian home. With a Greek Orthodox family the flowers do not stop at the service; there are memorials at forty days, three months, six months and a year, each one its own occasion. And for a Birpai family, native flowers can connect the person back to Country in a way an imported rose never will, banksia or waratah, though that is always the family's call and not mine to assume. As for the card, do not labour it. "Thinking of you and your family" is enough. Short ones land best.
There is a particular helplessness in sending flowers to a hospital bed you cannot get to, picturing a room you have never seen. Hospital rooms are small, and the bedside table is already holding water, a phone, glasses, whatever the nurses need to hand, so the flowers have to earn their place there.
If it is a day procedure or they are close to discharge, send it to the house instead. A recovery-at-home bunch will only chase them out the door otherwise.
Anna on what survives a warm ward: gerberas, chrysanthemums, carnations, the bright low-allergen things. A vase or boxed arrangement beats a hand-tied bunch to a hospital, because the ward keeps no spare vases. Same for a maternity room, and nothing strongly scented near a newborn.
Moving into a home is a big change and an unsettling one, for her and for you both. The room is not hers yet and the routine is all new, and you are too far away to drop in while she settles. Flowers on the windowsill are a way of being in the room when you cannot be there yourself. A line like "thinking of you, Mum" on the card is all it needs.
A boxed thinking-of-you arrangement is the kind choice here. It holds its own water, so nobody on a busy shift has to find a vase or keep it topped up.
If her memory is not what it was, send her the flowers she has known her whole life. Roses, daisies, a few natives. Not the exotic showpieces. A familiar bloom reaches somewhere a new one cannot, and I have built a lot of arrangements to that brief. Keep it small, keep the scent low, and if it is a shared room, remember you are choosing for two people, not one.
You are not going to be at the table. That is the whole reason you are here, and a birthday is the one occasion where the date is not negotiable: a day late reads as an afterthought no matter how good the flowers are.
Order by 2pm on a weekday and it goes out on that day's run, so the flowers are there while it is still her birthday. Birthday flowers to a house carry the ordinary nobody-home risk, which a mobile number in the notes handles.
Anna's steer for the warm months: bright and heat-hardy beats delicate and expensive. Gerberas photograph beautifully and read as a birthday instantly, but they are a short stem in a warm room, three to seven days. If you want her still looking at them next weekend, chrysanthemums under the colour do the heavy lifting while the gerberas do the talking.
A steady share of what goes into this town is not for a patient or a resident at all. It is for the ward, or the wing, from a family who watched people do a hard job well and want to say something about it after the fact. Often weeks after, when everyone else has moved on.
These go to the staff room rather than a bedside, which changes what works. Bigger is fine, scent is fine, and a card naming the ward matters more than the flowers do. A thank-you arrangement that a dozen people walk past on a shift change is doing exactly what you sent it to do.
Anna on the build: this is the one occasion where you want volume and longevity over refinement. Something that still looks like a gesture on day eight, when the next roster has come through and none of them were there when it arrived. Chrysanthemums and natives again, and skip the lilies for the same reason you would on a ward.
Order before 2pm on a weekday, or 10am Saturday, and the flowers are at their door in Port Macquarie this afternoon.
Browse Sympathy FlowersPlenty of orders do not slot neatly into a category. A milestone you are not sure how to mark, a friend going through something they have not named, a thank-you that is really an apology. You do not need the right label to send the right flowers.
If you want me to just pick, send natives. Most people reach for roses by reflex, and roses are lovely, but on this coast a banksia-and-protea bunch does something roses cannot. It takes the heat without sulking and holds the better part of a fortnight, and most of it is coast-grown rather than freighted in from interstate. And it belongs here. This is Birpai country and the natives grew in it long before any of us turned up. For a Port Macquarie doorstep, in any season, that is the one I would back.
Yes, and in our experience the flowers go to the main reception rather than the bedside, with staff carrying them up from there. Put the patient's full name and the ward number in the delivery notes. Without the ward, the arrangement waits at the front counter.
2pm on weekdays and 10am on Saturdays. It is a bench and run window rather than an office rule: the arrangement is built that morning from the cool room and goes out on that day's delivery run. An order at 1:55pm is tight but real. An order at 2:30pm is tomorrow.
No, we do not deliver on Sundays anywhere in the Hastings, and it is a stock decision rather than a service gap. The flower markets shut Saturday afternoon, so anything delivered Sunday would be built from Friday's stock. We would rather you got Monday's flowers on Monday.
Less well than the climate suggests. Warm humid air roughly doubles a flower's respiration for every ten degrees, so a rose that holds ten to fourteen days in a cool room can be down to three to six. Chrysanthemums, carnations and coastal natives hold their ground at ten days and up.
The florist looks for the most sheltered spot available and leaves the arrangement there. In a Port summer that matters more than usual, because an unsheltered west-facing step will cook a soft-petalled bunch in under an hour. A named safe spot or a mobile number in the delivery notes removes the guesswork.
Yes, by ferry, and it is the one genuine access constraint the town has. In the wet season the ferry can stop running and the low routes can flood. Neither is common. Ordering earlier in the day when rain is forecast leaves room for a second attempt the same afternoon.
Work backwards from the service, not from the cutoff. Aim for the tribute to arrive forty-five minutes to an hour before it begins, which usually means ordering the day before rather than the morning of. Port Macquarie's funeral homes sit close together on Gordon Street, so the run itself is short.
Yes. The towns around Port route through the same florists and the same day's run, which is why Port Macquarie Base draws patients from all of them. The cutoff is identical, but the margin behind it is thinner, so a 1pm order beats a 1:55pm one by more than it would in town.
In December 2011 I brought my own two up to Port, Asha not quite five and Ivy still tiny, to see their grandmother, my mum Julie. We called in on my own grandmother that same afternoon, four generations of us in the one town. I had been making that drive my whole life, and there I was making it again with the two of them buckled in behind me.
* My mum Julie, Asha and Ivy's grandmother, with the two of them in Port Macquarie, December 2011. The same town I had known since I was a girl in Taree.
Browse other categories
I will not pretend nothing ever goes wrong. The complaint that came up every February was the same one: a bunch that left the shop looking right and looked tired by the time it reached a west-facing verandah with no air conditioning. Heat on a Port doorstep in summer is brutal, and a soft-petalled bunch can cook in under an hour. So the build changed for the warm months. Summer orders to Port now go out heat-hardy by default, chrysanthemums and natives ahead of hydrangeas, boxed rather than wrapped, and the runs to exposed addresses go early in the day instead of the worst of the afternoon. You should not have to picture your flowers wilting on a step you cannot reach, and that is what the change was for. It will not save every bunch on a thirty-five degree day, but it gets most of them there in good shape.
1300 360 469
7am to 6pm weekdays
10am Saturdays
Or order online any time.
2pm weekdays, 10am Saturdays. No Sunday delivery anywhere in the Hastings, and that is a stock decision rather than a service gap: the markets shut Saturday afternoon, so Sunday flowers would be Friday's stock.
A flat $16.95 anywhere we deliver, which we subsidise. The real cost of a single-address run is usually higher. In the wet season the Hastings River and the low routes can flood and the North Shore ferry can stop, so order early if rain is about.
Most orders to this postcode come from interstate or down south, which means the florist is working off your notes and not local knowledge of the address. For a hospital, include the patient's full name and ward. For a home or an aged-care address, a mobile number for someone there helps, and for the gated retirement estates a gate code saves a wasted trip to the keypad. One more that only matters here: if the address is on the North Shore, say so, because it changes which run it goes on. Order before 2pm today and the flowers are at their door in Port Macquarie this afternoon.
"I always use Lily's when i am sending flowers to my mother in law who lives in Port Macquarie as I strive to support local business where i can but the bouquets from Lily's are genuinely always fresh, beautifully arranged and delivered on time! They even write my silly messages on the card. Good work guys, its appreciated! Kelly"
Kelly M., VIC, verified customer · read on ProductReview
Thanks Kelly, and thank you for coming back as often as you do. You clearly think about keeping your custom close to home, so let me set your mind at ease. We are a family business you send your order through, run from the Tweed, but the florist who makes your mother-in-law's bouquets is in Port Macquarie itself, the same one since 2008. I grew up an hour down the road in Taree, so I know the town. Sending through us still puts the work in Port Macquarie hands, so that part holds.
The silly messages are my favourite bit. A card in your own words, daft ones included, is how you reach her from Victoria, and we would never tidy those into something blander. On time, and still sounding like you. Good to keep getting that right, for her and for you.
Siobhan & Andrew, Lily's Florist
"Very easy to order flowers through the website. I purchased the flowers for my mother for her birthday. She loved them. The flowers were delivered same day as requested."
Lynette, verified customer · 12/06/2025 · read on Feefo
Thanks Lynette, and a happy birthday to your mum. Flowers for a mother in Port Macquarie land somewhere tender for me, because my own best memories of that town are family ones. My grandmother lived there, and every Sunday she would cook a roast that we ate until we could barely move, then the whole lot of us would walk down to Shelly Beach to work it off. So a daughter sending her mum flowers in Port is the sort of thing I picture very easily.
Same day as requested, and she loved them. For a birthday, arriving on the actual day is half the gift. Lovely to be part of hers.
Siobhan and Andrew, Lily's Florist
Once you have ordered, it goes straight to the partner florist covering Port Macquarie as a paid job, not a maybe. Order by 2pm on a weekday or 10am on a Saturday and it is built that morning and goes out on the day's run. There is nothing else you need to do.
If you want to know it landed, ring us on 1300 360 469 and we will find out for you. And if your person has not called to say thank you yet, do not read too much into the silence. People in hospital or in the middle of a hard week are not always quick to the phone. The flowers got there.
If something is off, I want to hear about it the same day, not in a review three days later when the flowers are already in the bin. Email a photo to [email protected], the front and the back, and ring 1300 360 469. We take it up with the florist who made it, that day. Most of the time it turns out to be a stem they ran short on and substituted without checking with us first. It is fixable when we hear early and a lot harder a week later.
The calls I take about Port are nearly all the same shape. Somebody four hours south, ringing to check a delivery went in rather than to complain about one. That is worth saying out loud: most people who ring us are not angry, they are just far away.
Phone beats email if it is urgent. The inbox is read through the day, but the phone is answered straight away.
ABN: 17 830 858 659
These route through the same florists and the same day's run, but each page carries the detail this one does not repeat: the ferry and the river on Lighthouse Beach, the Camden Haven timings on Laurieton, the acreage addresses around Wauchope.