Same Day Flower Delivery Yandina, Made Close By Since 2009

It's their birthday, they're at work all day, and you'd like the flowers to land while there are people around to see them. So decide first: work or home. For a workplace like the Ginger Factory on Pioneer Road, put their full name, the part of the site they work in and their mobile in the notes, because a counter full of visitors isn't watching for one bunch. Our birthday flowers go to either address, including a range picked for a friend's birthday.

I learned that in about 2008 at Tropical Fruit World on Duranbah Road, the Tweed's answer to the Ginger Factory, out in the hills behind our shop in Kingscliff. Gerberas for a woman's birthday, no section on the order. The girl on the counter tried to sell me a ticket for the tractor train. The birthday woman was out in the orchard, so I waited beside the Big Avocado until the train came back with her on it and a carriage of tourists clapping. Twenty minutes is a long time to stand next to an avocado. Which is why I'm asking you for it.

Anna has a view on this.

Nobody at work has a vase. Send an arrangement that comes sitting in its own water and it can wait in the staffroom until knock-off, with nobody hunting round for a jug.

Mum has sold the family home and moved into one of the new places at Riverbend, and you haven't seen it yet. Riverbend is the gated over-50s village on Sanctuary Street, so the gate is the first thing the florist meets. Put her house number and her mobile in the notes. The number tells the florist which door, and the mobile gets someone to let them in. Without either, in our experience, the flowers wait at the gate while the florist rings you instead. That holds for a 70th birthday as much as for flowers that just say you're thinking of her.

For the card: “Hope the new place already feels like yours.” Or: “Proud of you for doing the big move.”

Anna, on a smaller kitchen bench

A downsized kitchen has less bench. Go compact, and keep the flowers about one and a half times the height of the vase, which is the proportion that makes a small arrangement look finished. A tall one gets shifted every time someone cooks, and a vase that keeps getting shifted gets knocked over.

The notice gives a church and a time, and you're sending from somewhere else. First choice: the service or the house. For the house, sympathy flowers for home can go any day after; a week on, once the visitors have thinned out, is a good one. For the service, put the church, the start time and the funeral director in the notes. At All Saints' Anglican on Farrell Street, the florist in our experience delivers ahead of the start, so the funeral flowers are in place before people arrive. At Yandina Cemetery on Cordwell Road, a sheath or wreath lies flat on the grave where a tall vase would tip. Flowers don't do much against a death. People still read the cards.

For the card: “With love, and every good memory of him.” Or: “Thinking of you all today.”

Anna's call: whites, creams and soft greens. They carry from the back of a church and don't compete with anything at the front. Add a few native stems for someone who spent their life outdoors.

You don't know their taste, or there's no occasion at all beyond having thought of them.

Send natives when you don't know the person. Banksia, protea and leucadendron have tough, leathery surfaces the grey mould rarely gets a grip on, so they sit happily through a wet Yandina summer, and once they're finished in the vase, the banksia cones and protea heads dry on a shelf for months. Native flowers look right in a farmhouse and just as right in a townhouse.