Love Romance flowers in Bloomington

Bloomington is unusual in that almost everyone here shares the same romantic landmarks. The Sample Gates at the west end of Kirkwood, the wooded acre of Dunn's Woods behind them, Showalter Fountain on the arts plaza, the limestone arcades of the old campus, the trails at Griffy Lake north of town, and the April weekend of the Little 500 — the bicycle race that *Breaking Away* was filmed around, in this town, in 1979. Ask three couples in Bloomington where a first date happened and two of them will name a place inside a ten-minute walk of the others. That shared geography is genuinely useful when you are ordering flowers from somewhere else, because it means a card can be specific without being obscure. It also tells you who is buying: romance orders here skew young and local in a way anniversary orders do not. A large share are placed by someone who has been with the recipient for eight months, lives two miles away, and is trying to get a bouquet into a building they do not have keys to. That is a different delivery problem from a hotel suite, and it is mostly solved by information rather than by money.

Where to send it is the part people get wrong, so here is the working list and the anti-list. Residence halls work: a front desk is staffed, it will hold a delivery and call the student, and a desk hand-off with a mobile number on the order turns into a surprise the same hour. Give the hall name, the room, the full name as the university has it, and check the hall is open — they close over winter break. Downtown apartment buildings work, through a leasing office or front desk rather than an apartment door, so include the unit number and aim for late morning while the office is staffed. Rented houses near campus work with one caution: in Elm Heights, Prospect Hill and the Near West Side, houses are frequently rented by the room, so the name on the order may not match the name on the mailbox, and a phone number is what prevents a bouquet from sitting on a porch through a July afternoon or a January freeze. And the anti-list. A classroom is not a delivery address. There is no route into a lecture hall in Ballantine, the Kelley building or anywhere else — no desk, no staff member whose job it is, and a fifty-minute class that empties into a corridor. The public-delivery-to-class fantasy fails every time. A restaurant is not one either: a bouquet handed to a host stand sits beside a register while the table turns. And think twice about a workplace, because a bouquet on a desk is a public statement, and whether it is a welcome one is something only the recipient knows.

For a date night, the flowers should be ahead of the evening rather than part of it. Kirkwood Avenue and the courthouse square carry the rooms people book — Nick's English Hut, on Kirkwood since 1927 and probably the single most-proposed-in room in southern Indiana; the Uptown Cafe downtown; Janko's Little Zagreb up North Walnut; Cardinal Spirits on the south side. The performance calendar is the other half and is genuinely exceptional for a city this size: the Jacobs School of Music stages full operas and hundreds of recitals a year at the Musical Arts Center and Auer Hall, the IU Auditorium carries touring work, and the Buskirk-Chumley Theater anchors Kirkwood downtown. For all of these, carry the flowers in yourself and hand them over after — a bouquet checked at a theatre desk during a performance is a coat-check, not a delivery, and it is the version that actually works. Outside town and inside the widened 60-mile radius: Griffy Lake just north, Lake Monroe to the south and east, Lake Lemon northeast, Oliver Winery up the old 37 corridor, and the Brown County hills sixteen miles east on State Road 46, which in the third week of October are the reason half of Indiana drives to Nashville. A cabin or a lake rental needs a site or cabin number and a phone, and should be scheduled rather than ordered same-day.