Anniversary flowers in Birmingham

Nothing about an anniversary is an emergency, and that changes how the order should be built. You already know the date, which means the only real question is the sequence: does the arrangement need to be standing in a hotel room before a four o'clock check-in, waiting on a kitchen island before a seven o'clock reservation, or sitting on a desk at nine in the morning so the whole day carries it? Birmingham makes that easy to answer because its date-night geography is compact. The Grand Bohemian in Mountain Brook sits on Lane Park Road right beside the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and the zoo, which is the shortest walk from a hotel to a garden anywhere in the metro. Downtown holds the Redmont on 5th Avenue North — the oldest continuously operating hotel in Alabama — the Elyton in the old Empire Building, the Tutwiler at Park Place, and the Sheraton and Westin at the convention complex. Homewood has the Valley Hotel in SoHo Square, Five Points South has Hotel Indigo, and Hoover carries the Hyatt Regency Wynfrey at the Riverchase Galleria and the Renaissance at Ross Bridge with its golf course.

The dinner blocks are just as tight, and they sit almost on top of the hotels. Five Points South holds Highlands Bar & Grill and Chez Fonfon; Bottega is up on Highland Avenue a few blocks away; Pepper Place east of downtown has OvenBird and the Saturday market that anchors that whole district; Automatic Seafood and Oysters is in the Lakeview area; Homewood has Gianmarco's and the 18th Street strip; and Mountain Brook's villages — English Village, Mountain Brook Village, Crestline — each have their own handful of tables people book months out. That said, a restaurant is the least reliable address on an anniversary. Many will hold an arrangement at the host stand if you call the restaurant yourself first and ask, but a busy kitchen on a Friday has nowhere to put a vase and no obligation to babysit it. If the evening is the point, send the flowers to the house that afternoon or to the hotel room, and let the restaurant handle dinner.

Most anniversaries in this metro end at a house, though, and Birmingham's residential map is a set of distinct problems rather than one. Over the mountain, Crestline and English Village streets are narrow and the driveways are short; Cahaba Heights and Vestavia crest are a grid of hills; Greystone and Inverness out 280 include gated entries where a driver without a code turns around and comes back with your flowers. In town, Forest Park, Redmont Park and Highland Park are historic streets with steps and porches, and the Loft District and Avondale apartments need a buzz-in code or a working phone number. Add the Alabama summer to all of it: from late May to September an afternoon porch will cook an arrangement in two hours, so either put a mobile number on the order so the driver can hand it over, ask for a morning window, or send it where somebody is — a workplace, a front desk, a neighbor.