Get-Well Flowers: What Actually Helps

Get-well flowers are among the most-sent and least-considered gifts, and a substantial proportion of them arrive somewhere they cannot be accepted, at a time when the recipient cannot deal with them, in a form that creates work. A few minutes of thought fixes all three.

Check Whether the Hospital Will Take Them

This first, because it decides everything else.

Many hospital units restrict flowers and a number prohibit them outright. Intensive care and high-dependency units almost universally do not accept them. Oncology and haematology wards frequently restrict or ban them, because immunosuppressed patients are vulnerable to fungal spores in soil and standing water. Some units restrict on allergy and space grounds alone.

Policies vary between hospitals and between wards within a hospital, and they change. One telephone call to the ward — not the main switchboard — settles it, and it takes two minutes.

Where flowers are not accepted, the alternatives that are: a card, food if the dietary situation allows, a book, a phone charger with a long cable, decent hand cream, or anything that makes a hospital bed marginally less unpleasant.

Send to the Home Instead

Frequently the better answer even where the ward permits flowers.

A hospital stay is usually short and the recovery is long. Flowers arriving at the ward have to be transported home along with everything else, in a car, by somebody already carrying bags. Flowers arriving at the house a few days after discharge land when the visitors have stopped and the recovery is at its most tedious.

This is the single most useful adjustment to how people send get-well flowers, and it costs nothing.

The Specification

Small, self-contained, unscented, and low-maintenance — in that order of importance.

Small, because hospital surfaces are tiny and a home recovery does not need an object requiring a decision. A large arrangement is a burden.

In a vessel, because a wrapped bouquet is an instruction to find a vase, and neither a ward nor a person recovering at home wants that job.

Unscented, because a small warm room with a person in it for days is the worst possible setting for fragrance, and nausea is a common feature of both illness and medication. Lilies, freesia, hyacinth and stock are all wrong here.

Long-lasting and forgiving, because nobody is going to change the water. Our Orchid Presence — Soft will hold for weeks with no attention at all, which is exactly the right specification.

Colour

Bright and warm rather than pale and tasteful. A hospital room is grey, and the point of the flowers is to be a spot of colour in it.

Yellow, orange, coral and warm pink all work. The register of our Yellow and Orange Sunrise Arrangement is pitched for exactly this, and it is a rare case where the elegant muted palette is the wrong choice.

Avoid all-white, which reads as sympathy rather than encouragement and carries mourning associations for a significant number of recipients.

The Card

Two rules and they matter more than the flowers.

Do not ask for a reply. Somebody unwell is managing a queue of well-meaning messages requiring responses, and adding to it is a cost rather than a kindness. "No need to reply" written explicitly is a genuine gift.

Do not offer a diagnosis, a theory, or an anecdote about somebody else who had the same thing. Say you are thinking of them, say something specific and ordinary, and stop.

Where the illness is serious, avoid relentless cheerfulness. "Get well soon" lands badly on somebody who is not going to. Warmth without instruction is the register.

Four Things That Should Not Go to a Ward

Four things that regularly arrive and should not.

Anything in soil, which is prohibited on many wards because potting compost carries fungal spores that pose a genuine risk to immunosuppressed patients.

Anything large, which will not fit and becomes the ward's problem.

Anything strongly scented, for the reasons above.

And lilies, which combine strong scent with staining pollen and, if the recipient has a cat waiting at home, a serious hazard on discharge.

The Long Illness

The case nobody plans for, and the one where flowers do the most good.

Attention concentrates at the beginning — diagnosis, surgery, the first week — and falls away sharply afterward while the illness continues. Somebody three months into a chronic condition or a long recovery receives essentially nothing.

Something small arriving then, with no occasion attached and no reply expected, is worth more than anything sent in week one. A standing arrangement every few weeks, in the spirit of our Tempo Lazer Subscription, is the version of this that requires no remembering — which is the reason it actually happens.