Flowers Wollongong NSW: Same Day, Escarpment to Sea

Ordering flowers for a funeral you cannot get to is one of the hardest sends there is, and you are doing it for a family you cannot put your arms around. Wollongong sees more of this than most cities its size: the main cemetery and crematorium for the whole Illawarra sit together out at Unanderra and Kembla Grange, so these orders come from across the region, and from Sydney. The first thing to settle is where it goes. Condolences for the household go to the home. Wreaths and sprays for a funeral service go to the church or the funeral director, and they need to be there forty-five minutes to an hour before it starts. H. Parsons alone run four chapels across the Illawarra, so for the service flowers the chapel matters as much as the suburb. If you are not certain which, one of our partner florists near Wollongong will confirm the parish and the timing before anything is made.

Flowers do not carry the weight of what has happened. They stand in for you in a room you cannot be in.

White is the safe call across nearly every funeral here. Wollongong has large Macedonian, Greek, Serbian and Italian communities, and white wreaths and sprays read right across all of them. Chrysanthemums are correct at an Italian or a Chinese funeral, genuinely the expected flower. Send those same chrysanths to that family later as a housewarming gift and you have handed them cemetery flowers. Keep red away from a Chinese service entirely. Around early April, for Qingming, that community sends yellow and white chrysanths to the graveside rather than to the home. One thing I learned on the phones: log the church, the wreath, and whether the ribbon goes in Greek or Cyrillic, the first time a family calls, because Orthodox families mark forty days, then three months, six months and a year, and nobody should have to relive the arrangement each time. Not every Wollongong farewell is religious now, either, and a personalised one can carry any colour the family loved, even natives off the escarpment like waratah or banksia. White is just the safe default when you are unsure. On the card, plain is right. Thinking of you and your family is enough.

Sending flowers to a hospital bed you cannot sit beside is its own kind of helpless, and most of these hospital flowers come from a long way off. Wollongong Hospital on Loftus Street is the referral hospital the whole Illawarra and Shoalhaven ends up at, so the catchment is huge. Hospital rooms are small, and the flowers have to earn their bench space. From what our florists have seen, they go to the main reception or patient services first. Reception checks the patient and the ward, the ward clerk takes them in, and staff carry them up to the bedside, usually within half an hour to a few hours. The thing that trips people up is sending too early. If the person is still in Emergency or has not been given a room, the flowers sit at a desk. Wait until they have a ward and a room number, then put the full name and that room number on the order.

Anna on the Wollongong wards

I took thousands of these calls off the Pottsville bench, and the Wollongong ones had their own rules. Skip the lilies. The pollen travels on staff clothing from one bed to the next, and maternity in particular does not want it near a newborn. What does travel well onto a ward is gerberas or chrysanths, low pollen, low scent, and they cope with a warm room without sulking. In our experience ICU and the cancer wards tend to keep cut flowers out altogether, because those patients are immunosuppressed, so if that is where they are, ring the ward before you order anything. Send a vase arrangement or a box rather than a wrapped bunch, because nobody on the floor is hunting down a vase and water for you. And if discharge is close, send it to the home instead. A same-day hospital order can miss a fast discharge, and then you have get well flowers chasing an empty bed. And if you are wondering whether a bunch of flowers does any real good from as far off as you are, it does. In a randomised trial, surgical patients recovering with flowers in the room needed fewer painkillers and had lower blood pressure than those without. That is the gesture doing real work, which is part of why the wards that can take flowers want them there. On the card, light is kind. Thinking of you, hope you are on the mend.

A new mother is usually buried in visitors and running on no sleep, and you are trying to mark something enormous from outside the room. Anything that turns up there has to earn its place. Three maternity units around Wollongong take new baby flowers: the public birthing unit at the hospital, Wollongong Private in the CBD, and Figtree Private a few kilometres out. Put the mother's name and the ward on the order, and check it is not a special-care or intensive nursery, where flowers stay out.

The maternity calls always came down to the same two things. No lilies, because newborns and pollen do not mix and the staff will pull them anyway. And keep it compact and low-scent, something that sits on a crowded bedside table without taking it over. Day two beats day one, by the way. Day one is chaos and the room is already full. If the stay is short, send it to the home after they are discharged and it lands once things have gone quiet. A box arrangement is easiest on everyone, no vase to find and no water to top up. The card outlasts the flowers here. New parents read it out loud to each other, usually at some 2am feed, so it is worth getting right. Congratulations on your new arrival is all it needs to say.

Plenty of Wollongong orders do not fit a funeral, a hospital or a new baby. A birthday for a friend in a share house near the university, a thank you, a thinking-of-you for someone in aged care you have not visited enough. You do not need to land on the perfect category. As long as it arrives and lasts, you have done the job.

For most of these the instinct is to reach for roses. Anna would point you somewhere else for this city.

Roses are fine, and they keep well in these mild rooms. But for a Wollongong address I would put the native bunch in front of them nine times out of ten. Protea, banksia, leucadendron, kangaroo paw, the waxy stems barely register the humidity that wilts a soft flower inside two days, they take the salt and the breeze on a balcony, and most of them grew up the coast rather than on a freight run. They read like this place, and they go a fortnight without fuss. If you are stuck, that is what I would send. The one place I would change tack is an aged-care room, especially for someone living with dementia. There I would skip the exotic and send something they would know from their own garden, roses or daisies or a bit of lavender, in a box so the staff have nothing to fuss over.