Sympathy flowers in Wilmington

Grief in Wilmington is organized around older institutions than most American cities can offer. Holy Trinity — Old Swedes — has stood on Church Street since 1698, its burial ground the oldest continuously used in the state and still the site of a small number of services each year. The Cathedral of Saint Peter on West Sixth Street is the seat of the Diocese of Wilmington, which covers all of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and its calendar shapes the majority of the city's funeral Masses. Saint Anthony of Padua on North DuPont Street has been Little Italy's parish for well over a century and still draws multigenerational Italian-American families back into the neighborhood for a funeral. And on the East Side, the Mother African Union Church traces itself to Peter Spencer's 1813 congregation — the oldest independent Black denomination founded in the United States, and the origin of Wilmington's August Quarterly, which is still observed. Knowing which of these traditions you are ordering into matters more than any design choice, because each one has its own convention about whether flowers belong at the chapel, at the church, at the graveside, or at the family's house. Our job at the order stage is to get the arrangement to the right one of those four places at the right hour, which usually means a narrow window rather than a generous one.

Cemetery delivery is its own problem, because a graveside arrangement has to arrive in a roughly thirty-minute window and nobody is there to receive it afterward. Wilmington's burial grounds fall into recognizable groups. Cathedral Cemetery on Lancaster Avenue and All Saints Cemetery on Kirkwood Highway are the Diocese of Wilmington's two principal Catholic grounds and take the largest share of the city's committals. Silverbrook Cemetery, also on Lancaster Avenue, and Riverview Cemetery on North Market are the large nineteenth-century non-sectarian grounds; the small Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery at Delaware Avenue and Adams Street is the oldest of the garden-era burial grounds and sits within walking distance of Boyd's. Lombardy Cemetery on Foulk Road serves Brandywine Hundred. Out of the city, Gracelawn Memorial Park on DuPont Highway in New Castle and the Delaware Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Bear handle a large portion of New Castle County, and the veterans cemetery has its own procedural requirements — arrangements are generally removed on a posted schedule, and an easel piece left there will not last the week. For any graveside order, give us the cemetery name, the service time and, if you have it, the section: a driver who has to find one committal tent across a hundred acres with no section number is a driver who arrives after the family has left.