Just Because flowers in Brea

Brea is a city that decided, back in 1975, to spend public money on art nobody asked for. The programme has been running ever since and the result is a collection of well over a hundred outdoor works standing on street corners, in front of office buildings and beside parking structures across a town of 47,000 - sculpture you come across on the way to the dry cleaner rather than in a museum you had to drive to. It is a good frame for this page. A just-because bouquet is the same kind of gesture: unasked for, out of sequence, and effective precisely because no calendar prompted it. The orders on this page are the ones with no anniversary attached - a friend who had a bad fortnight, a neighbour who fed the cat, a mother three weeks after the baby when the visitors have thinned out, a colleague who covered a shift, or simply a spouse on a Wednesday. Nothing about the logistics is harder than an occasion delivery. What changes is the design brief: smaller, brighter, no ceremony, and in a vessel nobody has to wash and give back.

Everyday routes in Brea split along one line, and that line is Imperial Highway. South of it the city is flat and commercial - the office and lab buildings along Kraemer, Lambert and Valencia, Brea Mall at the State College corner, the shopping centres on Imperial itself - which means a weekday delivery there goes to a lobby desk with a suite number, and the flowers finish the day in somebody's passenger seat. North of Imperial the streets climb into the old Brea-Olinda oil field, where working pumpjacks still stand between the roofs, and delivery becomes residential in the fullest sense: Country Hills on the curving cul-de-sacs west of Brea Boulevard, Olinda Ranch and the newer tracts above Valencia and Santa Fe, and then 92823, which covers Carbon Canyon and Olinda Village - a small pocket of houses a few miles up a two-lane road, past Carbon Canyon Regional Park and the coast redwoods someone planted there, on the only direct route northeast toward Chino Hills. La Floresta fills the flat southeast corner. Downtown, the apartments and lofts around the Birch Street Promenade sit behind controlled lobbies. Each of those needs one different thing from you: a suite number, a gate code, a callbox name, a buzzer unit. A mobile number covers all four.

The most common just-because recipients in this city are teachers, and they are the easiest delivery of the week. Brea Olinda High School on Wildcat Way, Brea Junior High and the Brea Olinda Unified elementary campuses all take flowers at the front office and hold them there until the day ends, rather than carrying them into a classroom mid-lesson - so ask for something short and stable that survives a counter and a car. The city's other everyday destinations are just as ordinary: the Civic & Cultural Center at 1 Civic Center Circle, where the front counter signs; the Brea Community Center at 695 Madison Way; the retail and restaurant workers at Brea Mall, who are reached through employee entrances rather than a storefront and by shift rather than by hour; and the Tracks at Brea, the rail-trail on the old right-of-way, which is where a lot of this town walks in the evening and not a delivery address at all, but a fair indication of how close together everything here really is. Nothing in Brea is more than about four miles from anything else in Brea, which is why a no-occasion bouquet is a realistic same-day errand rather than a project.