Love Romance flowers in Birmingham

Valentine's week is the one part of this occasion that punishes spontaneity, and in a two-florist market it punishes it harder than in a big one. Red roses are a globally scheduled crop: what a shop will have on February 14 was ordered and paid for in January, and once it is committed, it is gone. So the practical advice for Birmingham is simple and unglamorous. Order by the first week of February if you want red roses specifically, expect delivery windows to be wide rather than precise on the day itself, and understand that same-day on the fourteenth is the one date of the year where the answer may genuinely be no. If you are late, the good move is not to hunt roses — it is to ask for designer's choice at the price you want and let the shop use what is actually beautiful and in the cooler. Tulips, ranunculus, lisianthus, alstroemeria and spray roses all read romantic and all travel better than a stressed red rose.

Where to send it is the decision most people get wrong, and it is worth thinking about for a minute. A workplace delivery is a public act: it lands in front of coworkers, it sits on a desk all day, and it is wonderful if the relationship is settled and mortifying if it is new or complicated. Downtown towers on 5th and 6th Avenue North, the Protective Life building on 280, the Colonnade and Inverness parks, the Blue Cross campus on Riverchase Parkway and the hospital departments on the Southside all take deliveries at reception — name the company, the floor or suite, and the recipient as the front desk would know them. A home delivery is private but riskier: nobody may be there. Apartments in the Loft District, Lakeview and Avondale need a buzz-in code or a working mobile number, gated addresses out toward Greystone and Inverness need a gate code, and in an Alabama summer a bouquet left on a west-facing porch at two in the afternoon will not survive until six.

If the flowers are part of a date rather than the whole gesture, sequence them earlier than the evening. Birmingham's romantic geography is small and specific: the Vulcan Park overlook on Red Mountain, where the cast-iron statue looks down over the whole valley, is still the most Birmingham place to end a night; Railroad Park and the Rotary Trail give downtown its evening walk; the restored Alabama and Lyric theatres face each other on 3rd Avenue North; the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Mountain Brook are free to walk into; and Oak Mountain State Park down in Pelham is twenty minutes from most of the metro. For an overnight, the downtown hotels — the Redmont on 5th Avenue North, the Elyton in the old Empire Building, Hotel Indigo in Five Points South — plus the Grand Bohemian in Mountain Brook take deliveries at the desk under the guest's name. Send in the afternoon, let the desk hold it, and keep your hands free for dinner.