Sending Flowers to Sunshine Bay When You Can't Be There Yourself

When we take an order for Sunshine Bay, the billing address is almost always somewhere else. Sydney, four hours up the highway. Canberra, a couple of hours back over the Clyde Mountain. The person the flowers are for is here on the coast, getting older on a street they have lived on for thirty years, while the ones who love them are up in the city where the work went. You cannot drive down for the afternoon. So the flowers go instead, and from that far away they are one of the few things you can still put in their hands, even if it means trusting a florist you will never meet to stand in for you at the door. Ordering is the easy bit. Getting the flowers to the right person, at the right house, on a quiet street that shares its postcode with four other suburbs, is the part worth getting right.

Of the four suburbs strung south of the Batemans Bay bridge, Sunshine Bay is the oldest and the most settled. Half the houses here were paid off long ago and never sold, held by people who came down for the quiet in the seventies and eighties and stayed for good. It is not a suburb a city florist gives much thought to, and that is the fear when you order from far away, that a website takes the money and no one actually turns up. Here, someone does. A florist working in or close to the Bay makes the arrangement that day and takes it to the door. Not a box couriered from a city warehouse. A person, on the day.

Order Online by 2pm

Flowers from $42.95, $16.95 delivery

Or Phone 1300 360 469

7am-6pm weekdays, 10am Sat

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Why Your Flowers Last Longer Here Than They Would in the City

Anna, qualified florist | more than ten thousand orders taken over the phone before she ever met the flowers

The question I got more than almost any other, from people ordering to a coast town for someone unwell or getting on in years, was a version of the same worry: will they even last. Down here the honest answer is better than most people expect. Summers on this stretch of coast top out in the mid-twenties, not the mid-thirties. A rose that gives a Brisbane recipient four or five days will often give a Sunshine Bay one closer to a week, because the stem is not fighting heat it was never built for. Cool coastal air is the best free preservative a cut flower gets, and the sea breeze here keeps things milder than the highway country just inland. It is not all upside. On a warm, still, humid day you can get a brown freckle on the outer petals of a rose. It is the sea air, not damage, and it lifts off to a perfect bloom underneath. The extra days are the point when you are ordering from away: the flowers are standing in for a visit, and the longer they hold, the longer they do it.

The thing that undoes it is not the weather outside. It is the air conditioning inside. A shut-up unit, or a warm room with the aircon running, dries the air right out, and dry air pulls moisture straight out of the petals, the soft outer edges first. Soft-headed flowers cop it worst. I watched hydrangeas that looked perfect on a Monday go limp by the Wednesday in a closed-up room, water still sitting in the vase. Top the water up daily, keep them out of the path of the vent, and you buy back three or four of them.

"She's not going to be changing water every day," the callers would tell me, and they were usually right. For a recipient who cannot fuss over a vase, I steered people toward the hardy end. South Coast natives, banksia and leucadendron, grown within a couple of hundred kilometres of the door and built to shrug off dry air. A leucadendron holds two to four weeks in a vase, longer again if the water is kept clean. Chrysanthemums are the hardiest thing I know: ethylene does not touch them, dry air does not either, and a spray mum will still be going a fortnight in. Carnations last nearly as long, with one catch, keep them off the kitchen bench, because a fruit bowl beside them finishes them in days. A rose is lovely, and a rose is working against the room. A banksia just sits there and behaves.

How an Order Actually Reaches a Sunshine Bay Door

There is no warehouse on this coast with our name on it. A florist in or near the Bay buys at market that week. They build your order the morning it goes out and take it to the door. That is the whole network.

* What happens to your order once it hits the Lily's Florist network.

What happens to your order when it hits the Lily's Florist network

The stock comes down from the Sydney market by refrigerated road, a few hours down the highway, and it is in the cool room before the shop opens. The market run is the reason the cutoff sits at 2pm, not later. The florist needs the afternoon to build the order and get it out across the suburbs south of the bridge.

Order online or by phone before 2pm on a weekday

Sent to the partner florist as a paid order, flowers already covered

Built that morning from the cool room, not pulled off a shelf

Loaded for the drive across the shared 2536 streets

Handed to the door, or a call ahead if no one is up front

What People Send to Sunshine Bay, and How to Get It Right

People send flowers to Sunshine Bay for plenty of reasons, but three come up more than the rest. The suburb runs older than its neighbours, so what lands here leans toward sympathy, toward the parent you cannot get down to see often enough, and the milestone birthdays a long life racks up. Mother's Day lands harder here than almost anywhere, all those retiree mums and their kids up the highway. A South Coast native bunch suits most of it, which is part of why the growers down here supply so many of them.

Sending Sympathy Flowers to a Sunshine Bay Family

Flowers will not fix what happened. You already know that. They stand in for the words that do not come easily down a phone line.

Two ways they go. To the family home, which on a street of houses like these is the common one, so condolence flowers to the house is usually the right call. Or to the service. For flowers at a funeral, Batemans Bay and Moruya District Funerals on the Old Princes Highway takes them before the family arrives, and we put the name and the service time on the order so nothing gets guessed at. Before we take a funeral order to a town this far from the city, we make sure a florist can get there on the day. A service arrangement that does not turn up is not something anyone can fix the next morning.

Anna on what to send

White is the safe answer and it is the welcome one here, mostly Catholic and Anglican families who expect flowers and know exactly what they mean. For the send-off of someone who walked the coastal track for thirty years, a native sheaf says more than a standard white one. Keep the card short. "Thinking of you and your family" is enough, and it is often better than the paragraph people agonise over. In a Catholic family the flowers rarely stop at the funeral, either. There is the month's mind a few weeks on, then the anniversary, and the callers who gave me the family name and what they sent the first time made the second arrangement easy to match.

Thinking-of-You Flowers, Sent from a Distance

You heard something, or you just have not been down in too long, and a phone call does not quite carry it. This is the order for that, and thinking-of-you flowers are exactly what the category is for.

The recipient out here is often home but slow to the door, so the florist phones ahead rather than leaving flowers to sit on a warm step. A shaded spot on the front path is the fallback, never the letterbox. On the card, "Thinking of you, wish I was closer" says the thing without dressing it up. Anna's steer on these was always the same.

The calls that opened with "nothing fussy, she won't fiddle with it" came in by the hundred. I sent those people to something bright that holds without a daily trim. Gerberas and chrysanthemums in a box, not a wrapped bunch that needs a vase the recipient has to go and find. Flowers that look after themselves for a week are the kindest thing you can put in front of someone who cannot chase them around a bench.

Turning 80 on a Quiet Street?

A 70th or an 80th for someone who has been on the same street since before you were born is not a balloons occasion. You cannot be at the table, so the flowers sit on it for you, whether it is for a mum or an old friend.

If it falls in a holiday month, it is worth a quick check they are actually home. A fair share of the houses out here sit empty out of season, and a milestone bunch on an empty porch helps nobody.

Most people reach for a big, showy arrangement for a milestone. In a small retirement unit that is the wrong call. The thing has to fit a side table beside the reading glasses and the phone, not take over the room. A low, dense arrangement of long-lasting stems reads richer than a tall one with nowhere to go. For an 80th I would send fewer, better stems over a wall of them every time.

Order before 2pm on a weekday and a florist near the Bay has it at their door this afternoon.

Browse Sympathy Flowers

Not Sure? Often It Is Someone Just Gone into Hospital

Plenty of orders here do not fit a neat category. The most common is a relative who has just gone into Batemans Bay Hospital, about three kilometres up the road. Flowers to the hospital go to the ward reception during the day. From what our florists have seen, staff take them through to the room from there. Get the order in by 2pm and it is there the same afternoon, and a short card does the work: "Thinking of you, hope you are back on your feet soon." The next most common is a parent who has moved into care, somewhere like Maranatha Lodge over at Batehaven, where flowers go to reception and a staff member walks them to the resident's room.

For a ward, or a shared room in care, hardy and scent-free wins. Skip the lilies with pollen, it drops and stains the sheets and the scent is too much where someone else has to share the air. Pollen-free Asiatics or lisianthus give you the look without either problem. In the cool half of the year you can push to tulips or ranunculus while they are about. It does not need to be the biggest thing on the page, either. A bright get-well box built by the florist that morning has never once let me down for someone who does not know what to pick.

Browse other categories

White Sympathy Anniversary Arrangements Roses Flower Bunches Lilies

How to Order Flowers to Sunshine Bay

Phone

1300 360 469
7am to 6pm weekdays
10am Saturdays
Or order online any time.

Same Day Cutoff

2pm weekdays, 10am Saturdays, no Sunday runs. In summer we push for a morning slot so nothing waits in the heat. In winter the cool works in your favour and the flowers keep on the step for hours.

Delivery $16.95

Flat rate anywhere in the area. The suburb is an easy grid to drive. The catch here is the postcode, not the traffic.

Getting It to the Right Quiet Door

Sunshine Bay shares postcode 2536 with Batemans Bay, Batehaven, Catalina and Surf Beach, so the one thing worth doing is putting the Sunshine Bay street on the order, not just the postcode. For an older recipient who may be slow to the door, the florist calls ahead rather than assuming a quiet hallway means no one is home, and a shaded spot on the front path is the fallback, never a hot letterbox. Out of season, when a stretch of the street is holiday houses sitting empty, a quick word on whether they are actually there saves a wasted run. Order before 2pm today and the flowers are at their door this afternoon.

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After You Order

Here is what happens once you press order. It lands in our system, we match it to a florist close to the area, and they build it from what they have in the cool room. You will not watch it being made. Nobody gets to. In the early days Siobhan and I ran these deliveries ourselves, one of us at a hospital reception with a baby screaming in the back of the car and five minutes to find a park, so the far end of this is not abstract to me. The photo on the website is the style, not the exact stems, because the florist works with what is best on the bench that day.

If you want to check anything at all, ring 1300 360 469 between 7am and 6pm on weekdays, or from 10am on Saturdays. A person picks up.

A note from Siobhan

The reviews I sit with are not the five-star ones. They are the ones where someone hours away could not get hold of us quickly enough when something was not right, and by the time they did the moment had passed. That happened more than I would like to admit. So we changed the simplest thing: the phone rings to Andrew or to me, not to a queue, and every order has a real person on the end of it, not a ticket number. If your flowers turn up late, or not the way you pictured them, that is on us, not the florist, us, because we are the ones who chose them. Ring us the same day and we can usually still put it right. A one-star review three days later, we cannot.

Email works too, at [email protected], but for anything time-sensitive the phone is faster.

ABN: 17 830 858 659

We Also Deliver Nearby

Batemans Bay Batehaven Catalina Surf Beach

About the Author

Andrew and Siobhan Thomson, co-founders of Lily's Florist

Andrew Thomson

Co-founder, Lily's Florist

I built this website, I answer the phone when it rings, and there is no call centre behind me. It has been Siobhan and me since we bought a daggy little flower shop in Kingscliff in 2006, knowing nothing about flowers and backing ourselves anyway. The whole reason the network exists is so two people at a kitchen table can get flowers to a door in a town like Sunshine Bay without a warehouse in the middle of it.

We started Lily's Florist in 2009. It runs on more than 800 partner florists now, and the one covering this stretch of coast has been getting flowers onto these streets for years. The long version, the accountant who told us not to and everything after, is on our About Us page.

* The original Kingscliff shop, bought in 2006. The brand and the network came three years later.