Flower Delivery Twin Waters, Same Day, Village or Resort

The birthday is at Living Choice on Baywater Drive, you are interstate, and the address you have is the house they sold. A villa number and a mobile in the notes gets an eightieth there before lunch.

Siobhan and I drove our own deliveries from the Kingscliff shop from 2006 to 2009, and the retirement villages beat us more often than the hospitals did. In 2008 I had eightieth roses for villa 14 at a village in Tweed Heads South. The villas ran 12, 13, 15, then a lake. I asked one resident where 14 was and got four, all walking me there at village pace, one of them explaining the numbering, which nobody had understood since it went in. The birthday girl was on her step before I knocked. She had watched the procession from the kitchen. Living Choice has a lake and a bowling green. Put the villa number in the notes and the florist will not need a procession.

Anna's call: lisianthus and a few roses, cut short, go a fortnight in a villa with the blinds half drawn. The ninetieths here get the same bunch.

The address on file is the villa. The person is in a room at Estia on Ocean Drive now, and you are not sure the flowers will register. Send them. They might mean more to you than to them, and that is fine. From what our florists have seen, flowers go to the front desk and staff carry them through, so the notes need the full name and the wing. Thinking of you, Mum. Love always. That is enough.

Anna, on a room with the aircon on

Aircon holds an aged-care room near thirty percent humidity, so a soft bunch that would go a fortnight at home is tired by day four beside the bed. Chrysanthemum and carnation shrug that off.

Someone you know is at the Novotel on Ocean Drive for a wedding, a conference or a fortieth, and you want flowers in the room when they get back from the lagoon. The resort has 370-odd rooms: a first name is a search, the surname on the booking is a delivery. In our experience the florist hands it to reception and the room gets a call.

A resort room has no vase. The box is the vase: it rides flat in the van, sits on the desk without tipping and drinks from its own foam, and reds hold their colour under room lighting for the whole stay.

A thank-you for minding the boat, a moved-in-next-door two doors down the canal, a rough week on the lake. You do not need a category. Say who it is for and the florist reads the rest off the card.

Anna's answer for these is Florist's Choice, because nothing has to match. The florist builds around what came off the truck freshest that morning, and on a glass table in a house full of light that beats anything picked off a photo.