Flowers to Robertson, NSW: For the Visit Up the Pass That Stopped Being Easy

Someone has died, the service is at St John's Anglican, the 1876 sandstone church on Hoddle Street, or at St Peter's at Burrawang, or at one of the funeral home chapels in Moss Vale, and you are working through who you owe a wreath and who you owe a posy on the kitchen bench.

These are two different orders, and they go to two different addresses. The wreath, the standing spray, or the casket sympathy arrangement is for the church or the funeral director: the director coordinates with the cemetery if the burial is at Robertson General Cemetery on the village outskirts. The arrangement at the family home is a separate gesture, a posy or a vase bunch, that lands on the day before or the day of the service, not earlier in the week. Saturday services need their flowers ordered by 10am on the Saturday for same-day delivery, or by 2pm on the Friday. Put the family surname and the service date in the order notes, and the partner florist who covers the corridor times them to the day. The ANZAC wreath, if that is the order, goes to the gate keeper at Robertson Cemetery on the morning of the twenty-fifth of April, not graveside.

White is the safer call for most Robertson sympathy orders, not the only one. The Anglican and older Catholic households tend to expect white roses, lisianthus, chrysanthemums, with a touch of green from native foliage. The secular cohort, particularly the celebrations-of-life that run in the gardens of the Robertson Hotel or at the Bowling Club on Yarranga Street, will take a brighter mix. If the family has told you what they want, follow that. If they have not, white is the choice that has come back as wrong the fewest times in fifteen years of taking these calls.

You are sending an 80th to a parent or aunt in Robertson, you are not in the Highlands yourself, and the recipient has held opinions about flowers since the Whitlam government.

She is at home in a weatherboard cottage with a verandah and a garden she still works in three afternoons a week, on the volcanic basalt soil that grows the Robertson potato and most of what she sends to the Show at the Kangaloon Road showground in early March. The bunch goes to the front door, the partner florist working the corridor from in or near Moss Vale takes care of that, and you can leave any gate or dog notes in the order; Robertson houses tend to have at least one of those. The 80th birthday range is what I would point you at for a starting frame, but the version that lands well is the one that reads as if it respects what she already grows.

I would put this kind of order in front of Anna before I touched it. She would say something close to the following. What is in season changes the read. In November, ranunculus and the spring-flushing garden roses are at peak, and a colour-led bunch sent to a Robertson 80th lands very differently from the same bunch in July. In July, the order gets anemones, tulips, and the cool-season stems that hold for ten days in a 596-metre kitchen, where the cool air does most of the work the florist cannot. A recipient who has grown her own garden for fifty years will read the bunch as honouring her or not, and the season carries most of that read. The bunch that lands is the one tuned to the month, not the date on the calendar invitation.

Your aunt, or your mum, or the friend who moved up during the tree-change wave, has not had a visit from you in three months, and the weekend you blocked off for the drive went to other things.

This is the thinking of you flowers order, not a sympathy bunch, not a birthday: a bunch that says you have been on my mind without saying you are sorry, because nothing has happened that warrants a sorry. The bunch goes to the front door, the partner florist working the corridor handles it, and the safe drop is the verandah if no one is in at the Pie Shop on the highway or up at the CTC for the Thursday morning coffee. Order before 2pm any weekday and it is at the door the same afternoon.

The two card messages that worked most often for these calls were short. "I keep thinking of you, and the next drive down is on the calendar" is the version that lands when the visit is overdue. "Thinking of you in your new place, from your old one" is the version that lands when the recipient has recently moved. The Pottsville office took dozens of these calls a year through the early 2010s, and the senders who tried to write something longer almost always wrote something that read as guilty. The shorter version reads as you were thinking about her, which is the whole job of the bunch.

There is a long tail of reasons a Robertson address ends up on the order list that does not fit a funeral, a milestone, or a check-in. The bride at a Robertson Hotel wedding may have forgotten to book the thank-you bunch for the mother of the groom. A Babe thirtieth-anniversary weekend visitor who came up the Pass for the Pig Potato may want to send a thank-you to the friend who hosted them. New arrivals at one of the heritage cottages off Hoddle Street get a welcome bunch from a city friend. Robertson Show week in early March, when the agricultural calendar has been running on the same Kangaloon Road showground since 1880, often produces a celebration order or two.

Anna on the long tail of Robertson orders

For the orders that do not fit the three patterns above, I would point callers at the florist's choice seasonal mix more often than at a named bunch. The reason is plainer than it sounds. The Pottsville office once took a call from a Sydney sender ordering for a friend who lived in one of the heritage cottages off Hoddle Street, looking for something that would not feel out of place in a 130-year-old weatherboard with the Yarrawa Brush native garden coming up behind it. The named bunches were almost right; none were quite right. The seasonal florist's choice arrived built around what came in fresh that Wednesday, and the call back from the sender, two days later, was that it was the first bunch the cottage owner had received in three years of city friends sending that did not look like a city florist's idea of what someone in a Robertson cottage might like. The cottage, the bunch, and the season did the work between them.