Send Flowers to Wentworth Falls, Someone Is Usually Home

You do not need a birthday. Ninety minutes of highway and a working week is reason enough, and thinking of you covers it without making you explain yourself. We left Sydney and our whole family in 2006 (which was rough) so I know that Tuesday. In our experience most weekday drops here are handed over at the door, and where nobody answers it goes out of the wind on the sheltered side. On the card, "No reason, just thinking of you" is plenty.

Anna: colour is what registers from the doorway, before anyone works out what is in it. Alstroemeria is the value buy in a cold house, a fortnight of it, as long as it is not next to the fruit bowl.

Flowers do not close the distance and you know that. They put something of you in the room while it happens. Funeral or family home is what to settle first, because it changes the timing more than the flowers. Service flowers tend to be timed with the funeral director, at Leura Memorial Gardens or the cemetery in town, so they are not standing since dawn. Flowers to the house go any day that week. On a lawn section a tall vase goes over the first time the wind comes across, so a wreath or a sheaf is the safer graveside build. On the card, "Thinking of you and your family" does it, and the card is the part that gets kept long after the flowers have gone.

Anna on colour, and what actually holds

Plenty of services here are not religious ones, and those families want what the person grew, natives and colour and all. A white default is the safe call that misses them. If white is right, ask for disbud chrysanthemum. Eighteen to thirty days in a cool room, and no browning at the edges.

An eightieth in a house that is already full is a different job from a thirtieth. Space is the constraint, and hands that ache do not want a wrapped sheaf and a hunt for the scissors. The right one arrives finished, in water, low enough to see over at the table.

Familiar beats impressive at eighty. Roses, daisies, stock. A stem she has had in the house before lands harder than one she has to work out.

Most people ordering flowers cannot picture what turns up. Andrew's first ever call at the Kingscliff shop was a woman asking three quick questions about flowers, and he turned round and looked at me. Neither of us had a clue.

Anna's steer for a house this temperature: a vase arrangement of alstroemeria and chrysanthemum, nothing tropical between May and September, and under $60 still buys a proper one up here.