A large share of the romantic flowers that arrive in Biloxi are ordered by people who have never set foot on this coast. The reason is Keesler Air Force Base, where the 81st Training Wing runs one of the Air Force's biggest technical-training pipelines: at any given moment there are thousands of young airmen living in Biloxi for a course that lasts weeks or months, most of them far from home, and a good portion of them attached to someone in Ohio or California or Texas who wants to put flowers in a room they have never seen. That produces a specific kind of order and a specific kind of mistake. The order is a long-distance send, placed on a phone in another time zone, to an address the sender half-remembers. The mistake is sending it to the base. Keesler is a controlled-access installation — a florist's driver without a base pass cannot deliver to a dormitory or a squadron building, full stop. If your person lives on base, the workable version is a handoff coordinated with them near a gate or the visitor center, and the better version is usually an off-base address: their own apartment in 39531 or 39532, a friend's house, a spouse's workplace. Write on base in the notes, put a mobile number on the order, and the studio calls to arrange the meet before it drives rather than after.
Proposals and staged surprises deserve an honest paragraph rather than a fantasy one. The romantic geography of this coast is genuinely good: the Biloxi Lighthouse standing in the median of Highway 90, the long sand beach along the Sound, sunset at the Small Craft Harbor with the shrimp boats in, the Gehry-designed Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art on Beach Boulevard, the oak streets and galleries of downtown Ocean Springs, the boats out to Ship Island from Gulfport. What a florist cannot do is stand on a beach at an appointed minute holding a bouquet while you time a question — deliveries run in windows, not to the second, and a driver cannot wait on public ground for a couple who may be twenty minutes late. Two approaches work instead. Pick the flowers up yourself at the shop earlier in the day, which is what most people should do for a proposal, or have the arrangement delivered to the hotel room, the house or the restaurant table you are going to afterwards, so it is waiting when the moment is already over and you have both stopped shaking. The second is also the version that photographs better, for what it is worth.