Sympathy flowers in Greensboro

The first thing to get right in Greensboro is which building. Hanes Lineberry runs more than one chapel here — the long-standing North Elm Street location and the Sedgefield Chapel serving the southwest side — and Forbis & Dick Funeral Service likewise operates several Guilford County chapels, including one on North Elm Street and one out in Pleasant Garden. So "send it to Hanes Lineberry" is a company, not an address, and a driver holding an arrangement in the wrong parking lot at 10:40 for an 11:00 service cannot fix it. Give the chapel, the street it sits on, the family surname and the service time. The second Greensboro habit worth knowing: families here often split the two events across two buildings — visitation at the funeral home one evening, the service itself at the church the next morning — and flowers sent to each do a different job. Chapel and sanctuary pieces are seen by everyone for an hour; what goes to the house is what the family lives with for two weeks.

Graveside work needs a gate and a lane. Green Hill Cemetery on Wharton Street is the city's historic burying ground just west of downtown, and its older sections are laid out on narrow drives that were never built for a florist van and a funeral procession at the same time — ask the funeral director which entrance and which lane before the morning of. Forest Lawn Cemetery, Lakeview Memorial Park on the north side and Guilford Memorial Park southwest of the city take the bulk of the modern interments, and those are straightforward drive-up deliveries when you can name the section. The one that surprises out-of-state senders is the New Garden Friends burial ground on New Garden Road, beside Guilford College — a Quaker ground, and plainness there is not an aesthetic preference but the point of the place. A large sprayed easel piece with ribbon and a banner will look wrong at a Friends burial in a way it never would three miles east. One simple plant, or nothing at the grave and something quiet sent to the house afterward, is the better instinct. Botanicagreensboro on New Garden Road is the closest bench on the board to that ground.

Services themselves spread across a small set of buildings. Downtown and north-central: West Market Street United Methodist Church on West Market, First Presbyterian Church on North Elm at the edge of Fisher Park, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church on North Greene. Catholic funeral Masses run mainly through Our Lady of Grace on West Market and St. Pius X on North Elm — the latter a few blocks from The Flowershoppes on East Cornwallis, which is as close as a sympathy order in this city gets to a short drive. Greensboro's Jewish families are served by Temple Emanuel and Beth David Synagogue, and for both the useful guidance is the same: flowers are generally not part of the service, so send a plant or a food tray to the home after the burial rather than an arrangement to the building, and ask the family first. The Quaker meetings — New Garden Friends Meeting and First Friends Meeting on West Friendly Avenue — carry the same plainness as the burial ground. Large suburban congregations including Westover Church on Muirs Chapel Road and Mount Zion Baptist Church on Alamance Church Road have their own sanctuary staff who will tell a driver exactly where a piece may stand.