Flowers to Suffolk Park, Where Byron's Cafes Go Home to Sleep

The room, or the service. Two different orders, and people ringing from Sydney or Melbourne are not always sure yet which one they are placing.

If it is the room, it is Patrick Bugden VC Gardens at 184 Broken Head Road: 66 beds, a secure dementia wing inside it, and the only aged care home in the shire south of Byron Bay. The RSL built it and named it for Private Patrick Bugden, who was awarded the Victoria Cross at Polygon Wood in Belgium and was dead six weeks later, September 1917. Nobody ordering flowers needs to know that. I think it is worth knowing anyway.

What you do need is the timing. The run there is a morning run: from what our florists have seen, reception at a place like this winds down mid afternoon and the residents are at dinner by five, so a 4:30pm arrival is a bunch sitting on a desk overnight. Put the resident's full name and room in the notes. The staff know 66 people by name, not by unit number, and a card short enough to read out loud gets read out loud.

If it is the service instead, the sort matters more here than it does in most towns. Suffolk Park has no cemetery, no crematorium and no funeral home. The independent director covering this stretch of coast works out of a car rather than a chapel, so there may be no building to send to at all. It might be the Community Hall on Alcorn Street with the beach across the road, a back yard, or Tallow Beach itself. Check with the family where before you order, then funeral flowers go to the venue they name, and sympathy flowers for the home are the ones that turn up the week after, when everyone else has stopped ringing. "Thinking of you and the family" is enough for the card.

Flowers do not make up for the visit you did not make. They still get carried in and put where someone can see them.

Anna, Qualified Florist

White is the safe choice in almost every other town in this country. Here I would not assume it. Six in ten people in Suffolk Park told the census they have no religion, the highest share of the ten towns up this way I have numbers for, and it changes what a service looks like: fewer churches, more halls and back yards and beaches, built around the person instead of a protocol. So before reaching for a white sheaf, ask what she actually loved. If the answer is the coast, native flowers are no compromise. Banksia grows wild in the dune line here, it holds its shape for a fortnight in this heat, and it says the thing white lilies cannot. If the answer is her rose garden, send roses. For the room, keep it low, non-toxic and familiar in a box arrangement the staff can move with one hand. Otherwise, ask.

You got the message a few hours ago and you have been useless with it since. Everyone reaches for flowers at this point because flowers are the only thing you can actually do from where you are standing.

Worth knowing before you order: the hospital is not in the town. Byron Central is at 54 Ewingsdale Road, eight kilometres northwest of Suffolk Park, and it turned ten last month. Fifty-four beds, and more than 213,000 emergency presentations through it in its first decade. Call it twenty-one thousand a year through a building with 54 beds in it, because it carries the summer as well as the people who live here. Which is the short version of why flowers want to be early rather than late.

There is no intensive care and no oncology ward on the site, so anything complex is transferred out to Lismore. The person you are sending to on Tuesday may not be in the building on Thursday. Ring the ward first if there is any chance of a transfer or a same-day discharge, and send it to the house instead. Sending to a ward the patient has already left is the most common way get well flowers go astray in this shire, and it has nothing to do with the florist.

One more, because it is 20 of those 54 beds and almost nobody expects it: Byron Central runs a sizeable mental health unit. From what our florists have seen, units like that tend to have their own practices around glass and anything breakable, and the practices vary. Ring the ward and ask rather than assume. For a straightforward ward stay, hospital flowers go to reception, staff log them, and they are at the bed by the next round.

Some of the get well flowers going to that hospital are for a fortnight of physio. Some are for something that is never going to get better, and from where you are sitting the two orders look identical. If yours is the second kind, do not send something smaller. The card gets read more than once.

A bloke rang me from Wollongong once, wanting the biggest glass vase arrangement we had sent to his sister on a ward. I talked him down and he was not happy about it. A bedside table in any hospital is about the size of a dinner plate once you account for the water jug, the phone and the tissues. Anything bigger gets moved to the windowsill, then to the corridor, then home in somebody's boot with half the stems snapped. Compact, in something the nurse can shift with one hand, no heavy fragrance in a shared room. He rang back to tell me his sister had put it on the tray table and kept it there for a week. Small wins.

The birthday is today, they are turning thirty or forty, and you are somewhere else. One in three people living here is between 25 and 44. Of the ten towns up this way we have numbers for, that is the highest, so this is the order we see most.

It is also the order that goes wrong most, and never for the reason people expect. The flowers are fine. The address is the problem.

We owned a shop in a beach town for three years, so we learned what a coastal street looks like when nobody is on it. Three in the afternoon, a Wednesday in June, standing in our own doorway, and you could see from one end of the street to the other without a single person in the frame. Twenty-five dollars in sales that day, most of it discounted soap. Suffolk Park pulls the same trick at 1pm on a Tuesday for the opposite reason: the street is quiet because the whole suburb is at work in Byron, and the front step gets sun until late afternoon.

Two things fix it. Put a mobile number in the order so the florist can ring rather than guess. Or send it to where they actually are: a cafe or a shopfront in the CBD is five minutes from the depot, and in this postcode that is the better address rather than the fallback one. 30th birthday flowers and 40th birthday flowers both land better in front of an audience anyway.

A thirtieth also has an audience, which is its own kind of pressure. Somebody photographs the bunch before she has finished reading the card. Suffolk Park pays the highest rent of the ten towns up this way, on a household income about ten percent above the state average, so a token bunch reads as a token. We are not going to talk you up a price bracket. Just know this is the one order on the page where the size of the thing is part of the message.

Most people order roses for a milestone. Anna has a view on that.

Roses in a car for the back half of a shift are a three-day arrangement, and you paid milestone money for them. Gerberas are the better call, but only if the florist wires the necks. A gerbera has a hollow stem and it will bend at the neck inside 48 hours of heat if nobody has run a wire up it. Ours do. If you want something that will not need thinking about at all, leucadendron and protea sit in a vase and hold their shape for a fortnight, and they photograph better on a kitchen bench than roses do on day four.

I ran a flower shop for three years and could not have answered a question about flowers to save myself. First call I ever took, a lady fired three quick ones at me and I told her to hang on while I checked with my wife. Siobhan knew less than I did. So if you are sitting here unsure what to pick, you are in better company than you think.

A promotion, a break-up, or a friend who has gone quiet since March, which is a thinking of you order wearing a different hat. Half of what we send to Suffolk Park has no category and does not need one.

Let the florist pick, and mean it. September is the driest month of the year here and the stock coming down from Brisbane in spring is the best you will see all year. February, and the same florist is working around a wet fortnight and a market that has been picked over. People assume a florist's choice order means the leftovers. The florists I know treat it as the opposite of that, because it is the only order where they get to build from whatever came in strongest that morning instead of matching a photo taken in another season. Tell us the mood in the card message and let her do her job. That is the order I would place myself.