Sending Flowers to Surf Beach for a Parent You Can't Get Down to See

Someone has died, and you are too far up the coast to knock on the door yourself. So you send instead.

Two ways they go. To the family home, which on these streets is the usual one, so condolence flowers to the house is the safe call. Or to the service, where funeral flowers go to Batemans Bay and Moruya District Funerals on the Old Princes Highway, who take them in before the family arrives; we put the name and the service time on the order so nothing is left to a guess. Because Surf Beach is a fair way from the city shops, we confirm a florist can reach the service on the day before we take the order. 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 for the Catholic and Anglican families here it is the right one. For the rest it is the wrong default, and a lot of the send-offs down here are not in a church at all. For someone who walked the surf beach every morning for thirty years, a native sheaf, banksia and flannel flower, says more about the life than a standard white wreath ever will. Keep the card short. "Thinking of you all" does more than the paragraph people agonise over. And ask the family before you assume white, because as often as not they want the person, not the template.

It has been too long since you were last down, and a phone call does not quite carry it. This is the order for that, and thinking-of-you flowers are exactly what it is for.

If your parent is still in their own home, the recipient out here is often in but slow to the door, so the florist rings ahead rather than leaving a bunch to sit on a warm step. If they have moved into care, most Surf Beach families are sending to Opal at Denhams Beach, two kilometres south, where from what our florists have seen the flowers go to reception and a staff member walks them through. If it is a palliative stay, flowers count for more there than almost anywhere, and the same low, scent-free rule holds. Put the full name and the room or wing on the order either way.

Skip the big showy bunch for a room in care. Everyone reaches for the tall, dramatic arrangement, and beside a bed in a small room it is the wrong call. It crowds the side table, and if it is heavily scented it is unfair on whoever shares the air. I steered these people toward low, boxed arrangements of long-lasting stems: chrysanthemums, carnations, something the recipient grew up with rather than something off a magazine cover. For a dementia ward, keep it non-toxic and familiar, roses and daisies, nothing a resident might be tempted to taste. Flowers that look after themselves for a week are the kindest thing you can put in front of someone who cannot chase a vase around.

You want flowers on the table when the family walks into the beach house, or you are the one arriving and someone wants to mark it. It is the happiest order Surf Beach gets, and the easiest one to get wrong.

The whole thing turns on timing. In December and January, and through every school holiday, the houses are full and it is simple. Any other week, half the street is empty, so we confirm someone is there and match the delivery to the arrival day, the day before or the morning of, never a bunch left on a locked porch for a fortnight. In summer it is a morning run, because a beach-house doorstep bakes in the afternoon sun no matter how good the sea breeze feels. A Christmas arrangement in December, a just-because bunch any other week, both work here; the trick is the day, not the flower.

On the flower itself, Anna would tell you to let the season pick the stem. In November you can still get peonies trucked down from the Southern Highlands ranges, a couple of hours inland, for the week or two they are about. Through summer I would leave the soft, thirsty stems off a hot beach-house order, hydrangeas especially, and send coastal natives instead: banksia, protea, the things that look like they belong on that headland and hold up in a warm room. A native arrangement reads as exactly the right register for a beach house anyway, which is a happy accident.

Plenty of orders here do not sit in a neat box. The one that came up on the phones more than any other was the relative just gone into hospital, up in Batemans Bay for now, and the sender with no idea what you are even allowed to send to a ward.

For a hospital room, keep it small, hardy and scent-free, and skip the lilies; the pollen drops and travels, and the scent is too much where someone else has to share the air. From what our florists have seen the flowers go to the main reception, not up to the ward, and a clerk carries them through, so put the ward and the room on the order or it can sit at a desk. Pollen-free Asiatics or lisianthus give the look without the pollen, and a short card carries it: "thinking of you, back on your feet soon." A get-well box built that morning has never once let me down for someone who cannot pick. And if you truly cannot choose, the Australian Natives Bunch is the one I would put my name to for these streets every time: hardy, local, and right at a hospital, a care room, or a kitchen table on a back street alike.