Funeral QuestionsWhat Do You Actually Do With the Mountain of Flowers After a Big Funeral?
Asked by waning_gibbon2 ·
Mum's funeral was four days ago and honestly I underestimated how many people would come. She taught piano out of our lounge room for thirty-odd years, so half her former students turned up with flowers as well as family. We ended up bringing home something like thirty arrangements, wreaths and bouquets both, and they are currently covering every surface in my house. Some are already going brown at the edges.
I feel a bit ridiculous even asking this, but I don't know what I'm "allowed" to do here. Do I have to keep them all until they're completely dead? Can I give some away? It feels weirdly disrespectful to be thinking about flower logistics four days after burying my mother, but they're genuinely taking over the house and I don't know what the etiquette is.
3 Replies
Thirty arrangements is a lot for any house, and nothing about dealing with them practically is disrespectful. If anything, most of the people who sent them would rather see them used or enjoyed a bit longer than left to die on your dining table out of a sense of obligation. In eighteen years doing funeral flowers, I've never once had a customer come back upset that a family "moved the flowers on" too soon.
Practically, with that many: sort them today into three quick piles. First, anything already going brown or dropping petals: that's compost or the bin, no keepsake value left in most of those. Second, anything still genuinely fresh: ring your closest hospital ward, aged care home, or hospice this afternoon; most will happily take arrangements same-day, and a lot of families don't realise how welcome that call is on the receiving end. Third, set aside two or three of the most meaningful pieces, maybe the ones from people closest to your mum, or ones with flowers she particularly loved, and either press a few blooms from those or let them air-dry properly instead of trying to keep all thirty going. There's a good rundown of pressing, drying, and donating options here if you want the how-to once you've made the split.
You're not obligated to keep any of it beyond what actually helps you. The gesture was already received the moment it arrived.
I'd gently name what's underneath the question, because it's a common one: it can feel like moving anything on too quickly is moving on from your mum too quickly, and those aren't the same thing at all. Thirty arrangements wilting in your lounge room isn't a memorial to her. It's just logistics that happened to arrive alongside a huge amount of grief, four days in, which is genuinely one of the rawest points in all of this. Making a practical decision about flowers doesn't compete with how much you're grieving her.
If it helps to have a small ritual rather than just "getting rid of them," even doing the sorting lorikeet_lane described as one deliberate task (thanking each arrangement briefly as you decide its fate, so to speak) can make it feel less like discarding and more like a considered goodbye to that particular part of the day.
When my husband died I kept exactly one flower (a single pressed rose from the arrangement his sister sent) and gave almost everything else to the aged care home two streets over the same week. Six years on, that one pressed rose does more for me than thirty wilting arrangements ever could have, and I still think about the elderly residents who got fresh flowers that week for no occasion at all. It felt like the sympathy kept moving rather than stopping in my lounge room.
For what it's worth, nobody who came to my husband's funeral has ever asked what happened to the flowers they sent. What they remember is that they came, and that you let them help in whatever way they could that day. That part's already done regardless of what you do with the flowers now.
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