Get Well flowers in Evansville

Before you type anything, settle which building. This city has two hospital systems and a naming problem, and between them they account for most misdelivered get-well orders here. Ascension St. Vincent Evansville, at 3700 Washington Avenue, is the hospital that a very large share of the city still calls St. Mary's — the sign changed, the habit did not, and a relative telling you *she's at St. Mary's* is describing the right place with the wrong name. Occasionally you will hear an older relative say Welborn, which has not admitted a patient in a long time at all. On the other side, Deaconess runs two hospitals, not one: Deaconess Midtown at 600 Mary Street in the middle of the city, and Deaconess Gateway out in Newburgh, roughly twelve miles east and over the Warrick County line off the Lloyd Expressway near the interstate. *Deaconess* on its own is therefore a system, not an address, in exactly the way *Ziemer* is a family firm rather than a chapel. Get three facts from whoever is at the bedside — which campus, which unit, which room number — plus the patient's name as the hospital has it registered. A surname and a system name will get a driver as far as a lobby desk and no further.

Which building it is also decides what the delivery costs you in time, because the bench is not spread evenly across this market. Both Evansville shops sit in 47710 on the north and west sides: Flowers Andmorein at 1000 W. Franklin Street and Cottage Florist And Gifts at 919 North Park Drive. From there, Deaconess Midtown on Mary Street is a short, reliable run and the easiest hospital in the city to hit late. Ascension St. Vincent on Washington Avenue is a cross-town leg. Deaconess Gateway in Newburgh is the long one — out the Lloyd Expressway and over the county line — and an afternoon run out the Lloyd between about 4:30 and 5:30 is the one piece of Evansville traffic that reliably eats a window. One consequence catches people out: The Women's Hospital is on the Gateway campus in Newburgh, so a new mother is in Warrick County rather than downtown, and flowers addressed to Midtown for her will not find her. Also on the map: Encompass Health Deaconess Rehabilitation Hospital in Newburgh for longer recoveries, Ascension St. Vincent Warrick at Boonville, and Deaconess Cross Pointe for behavioral health — that last one is a telephone call before you order rather than an ordinary delivery, because units of that kind restrict glass and a good deal else, and the answer has to come from the unit and not from us.

Evansville is the medical hub for a wide, thinly populated region, and that changes the shape of a get-well gift here more than people expect. Patients arrive from Mount Vernon, Poseyville, Princeton, Fort Branch, Boonville, Rockport and Tell City on the Indiana side — and, because the Ohio River is the state line and Henderson is only fourteen miles south, from Henderson, Robards, Spottsville, Morganfield and beyond on the Kentucky side. So the person in the bed frequently has a family who are not merely out of town but out of state, sleeping in a hotel out on Green River Road or driving the US 41 twin bridges twice a day. Two useful moves follow. If the patient is too unwell for anything to reach the room, send the arrangement to the family — to the hotel, with the reservation surname, or to the house they go back to at night. And if the patient is admitted outside Evansville, the radius covers the regional hospitals: Good Samaritan at Vincennes, Memorial Hospital at Jasper, the hospital at Princeton in Gibson County, Owensboro Health Regional across the river, and Henderson's hospital, which Shaw's Flowers Inc at 423 2nd Street serves from a few blocks away without ever crossing the bridges. Distance sets the timing, not the price: in-county is a comfortable same-day run before the cutoff, forty-five minutes out wants a morning order, and the edge of the radius late in the day is realistically next-day.

Now the build, which is where a hospital order is won or lost. Lilies are the first thing lifted out of an arrangement on an oncology or infusion floor here, and the reason is practical rather than fussy: the anthers shed a rust-coloured dust that stains linen for good, and the perfume travels further than the doorway in a building where somebody two rooms down is nauseated by smells they used to enjoy. Assume none anywhere the word *infusion* appears, and extend the same caution to anything else strongly scented. Size is the other half of it, and people get it backwards. Ask anybody who has slept in a chair in one of these rooms: there is one table, it swings out over the bed, and it is already carrying a water jug, a phone on a charger and whatever the hospital handed over that morning. A tall design ends up exiled to a windowsill behind the curtain. Build wide instead of tall, on a base heavy enough to survive being shoved aside at three in the morning. Soil is the third question. A growing plant in a pot is the right present for the day somebody gets home and the wrong one for a patient in treatment — nobody objects to the leaves, they object to a pot of living earth beside a person with no immune system. Intensive care in both systems here is effectively closed to flowers, and anything carried up is turned round at the doors; what works is putting it into the hands of whichever relative has been sitting it out in the family area. And one hard local fact about children: there is no pediatric hospital in Evansville. A child who is genuinely ill gets moved — Riley in Indianapolis, a hundred and seventy miles north and on a different clock, or Louisville, or St. Louis — and our radius reaches none of them. The delivery that helps in that situation is the one waiting at the family's own address for whenever they get back to it.