Springvale Flowers, VIC: White for a Wake, Red for the New Year

A death lands on a whole circle of people, and you are the one who has ended up sorting the flowers, wanting this one part to be right. Flowers will not fill the gap that has opened, and you know that, but they say what you cannot say from a distance. Start with where it is going: funeral hall, family home, or graveside at the cemetery. Three different gestures, and that is the first thing to settle.

For a service, the flowers go to the funeral director or the chapel with the date and time on the order, and standing sprays and wreaths on easels are what the halls here are set up for. For a Vietnamese wake, which often runs three to five days at home, they want to arrive while the family is gathered. In our experience, white and yellow carry across almost every service at this cemetery. Keep the card simple and sincere, because the family will keep it long after the flowers are gone: "Thinking of you and your family."

Not one red stem in a Chinese or Vietnamese funeral piece. That was the rule I gave every caller who was unsure, because red there reads as celebrating the death. White chrysanths, white lilies, white orchids, and for a Chinese service yellow sits in comfortably too. I once had a caller from Footscray halfway through ordering a bright mixed bunch for a Chinese funeral, thinking brighter was kinder, and we walked it back to white and yellow chrysanthemums on a stand. That is the one to get right.

And not every family wants flowers at all, which is the part people do not expect. For a Hindu service the family handles the marigold garlands themselves, so a fruit basket to the home, or flowers after the cremation, reads better than a wreath at the door. For a Muslim family, check first, and send to the home rather than the mosque. When you are not certain, the safest thing you can do is tell us the community, and we will tell you the rest.

If you are marking a Lunar New Year you do not keep yourself, for in-laws or a colleague or a friend's family, the worry is the same one that hangs over the funeral flowers: getting the gesture right. Here it is easier than it looks. Springvale throws the second-largest Lunar New Year festival of its kind in Victoria, big enough that Buckingham Avenue shuts to traffic for it, and this is the one time of year when red and gold are exactly right to send.

The timing is what catches people. Orders need to land before the new year, around mid-February, for the luck to count, so a few days early beats a day late every time. In the festival fortnight, anything heading near Buckingham Avenue gets routed around the closed street and locked into a morning slot before the crowds build. If the address is one of the newer apartments by the station, we will want a phone number, since those lobbies run on intercoms and there is nowhere safe to leave a delivery. The celebration range is the place to start.

Anna on the cultural calendar here

Orchids and blossom branches are the ones that say it, cymbidium or phalaenopsis for elegance and length, peach or cherry blossom for the luck. They go the distance too, which matters when the house is full of visitors for a week. One thing to watch in February: it is the warm, windy end of the year here, and that south-westerly off the bay dries a doorstep out, so I would have these delivered in the morning and kept out of the wind and off a sunny sill.

New Year is not the only date that moves flowers in this suburb, either. Qingming in early April sends Chinese families to the graves with yellow and white chrysanths, Khmer New Year falls the same month for the Cambodian community, and Pchum Ben comes in spring when families carry white to the temple. Different communities, different weeks, the same rule: the flowers have to land on the day itself.

Hospital or home recovery. Sometimes these flowers mark that the worst is over, sometimes they are the one thing you can do from a distance, and often you will not know which, which is fine. The split worth sorting first is hospital or home.

The day clinic on Balmoral Avenue does day procedures, so for someone home after a scope or a small procedure there, flowers are better sent to the house for when they get in. The acute hospital for the area is Dandenong, about five kilometres south-east, with the maternity unit as well. From what our florists have seen, ward flowers go to the main reception and a clerk walks them to the bed, usually within a few hours, so the order needs a full name and a ward, and only once the patient is on a general ward, well clear of emergency or intensive care. Worth a quick check they are still admitted before sending, since short stays turn over fast.

No lilies for a ward. The pollen is an allergen in a shared room, and plenty of Melbourne hospitals ban them by name. Roses, carnations and chrysanthemums are all safe, and a box arrangement works better than a hand-tied bunch on a ward, because nobody on a busy maternity floor has a spare vase and the time to fill it. Skip the heavy scent as well. A small, unfussy arrangement that sits on the bedside table is the one that earns its place. The get well range and the broader hospital flowers are built for exactly this.

None of the three above quite matched what you are sending. That is fine, plenty of orders sit in between.

Anna has a default she would reach for here.

For a Springvale address when you are not certain, I would send white. A white-led mixed arrangement is respectful at a service and gentle by a hospital bed. In a home it just reads as kind. And it never comes across as the wrong colour, whichever way the order is going. You do not have to spend big for it to land right, either. If you would rather keep it simple and trust the florist to use the best stems that came in that morning, Florist's Choice in white and soft tones is the safe call. Put the suburb and the occasion in the notes, and we steer it the rest of the way.