Sympathy flowers in Broomall

In Broomall the two roads that define the township are also the two roads that define this category. West Chester Pike carries the Delaware County funeral homes most Marple families use — D'Anjolell Memorial Home's Broomall chapel is on the Pike, a short run from the crossroads, and Donohue Funeral Home sits further west in Newtown Square with a second location in Upper Darby. Sproul Road runs the other way, south past Springfield to SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery, which is where a large share of Catholic burials from this township end up. Stretch Funeral Home is on Eagle Road in Havertown, ten minutes north. That compactness is the practical fact about sympathy here: chapel, church and cemetery are usually within four miles of one another, which means a studio can cover a viewing on Tuesday evening and a graveside on Wednesday morning without a second run out of the county. Before you do anything else, read the obituary twice and copy the chapel name and street address onto the order exactly as printed. Chapels change ownership and names more often than families expect, a viewing is frequently at a different address from the funeral Mass, and flowers delivered to the right chapel on the wrong day — or the right day at the wrong building — is the one mistake in this category that cannot be fixed with an apology.

Cemetery geography is worth planning around, because graveside work has physical requirements a chapel piece does not. SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery on Sproul Road in Springfield is the closest large burial ground to Broomall and the most frequent graveside address on this grid. Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill and Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon take much of the rest of the Catholic volume from eastern Delaware County, with Cathedral Cemetery on Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia beyond them. West Laurel Hill on Belmont Avenue in Bala Cynwyd, burying Philadelphia and Main Line families since 1869, is about seven miles north and runs on a section-and-lot system with a groundskeeping office, so a piece has to arrive before the committal rather than during it. Haym Salomon Memorial Park out in Frazer serves Jewish burials from this side of the county, and the old parish burial grounds scattered through Marple, Newtown and Radnor townships — including the churchyard at Old St. David's in Radnor — take small graveside work only. Two build rules apply to all of them: an open hillside takes down a tall glass vase within minutes, so ask for a stand or a weighted vessel, and greens hold their color in wind and cold far better than open-faced blooms do. If the committal is at a cemetery different from the church, say both addresses on the order and name which one gets the flowers.

Tradition changes what you should send, and this township holds several side by side. Catholic services carry the widest range — standing easel pieces, cross and wreath forms at the chapel and church, a casket spray arranged by the immediate family, and vase arrangements sent to the house afterward. The parishes doing most of the Mass volume near Broomall are St. Pius X here in the township, St. Anastasia in Newtown Square, St. Francis of Assisi in Springfield, St. Denis in Havertown and St. Mary Magdalen in Media. Greek Orthodox families in Marple Township generally work through St. Luke in Broomall; Orthodox practice runs a distinct timeline, with memorial observances at forty days and one year that are as appropriate a moment to send flowers as the funeral itself. Episcopal services — Old St. David's in Radnor and the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr among them — tend toward restrained white-and-green altar work that can stay up for Sunday rather than elaborate freestanding pieces. For Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jewish families, flowers at the funeral are generally not the convention and a charitable donation is; families here usually work with Philadelphia-area chapels — Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks and Joseph Levine & Sons are the two names that come up most — and the gesture that lands is a plant or a fruit-and-flower arrangement sent to the shiva home during the week of mourning, addressed to the household rather than to the chapel. Black church funerals in Chester, Darby, Lansdowne, Yeadon and Southwest Philadelphia, all inside this radius, tend toward larger and more expressive standing pieces, later service times, and flowers that travel from the church to the cemetery. When you are not sure which applies, ask the funeral director — they answer this several times a day.