Birthday flowers in Chico

Chico is a one-hospital, one-university, one-brewery employment town, which makes office birthdays unusually easy to place. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. sits at 1075 East 20th Street with its taproom, gift shop and Big Room on the same campus — the single most-requested desk address in the city, and a ten-minute run from Notre Dame Boulevard. Tri Counties Bank keeps its corporate headquarters in Chico rather than in Sacramento or San Francisco, so the bank's operations and lending staff are local birthdays rather than out-of-town ones. Build.com works out of Otterson Drive, Lulus runs its online fashion business from Chico, and Klean Kanteen builds its bottles here. Add Enloe Medical Center at 1531 Esplanade — the largest employer in Butte County and a building where the birthday recipient may be a nurse on a twelve-hour shift rather than a patient — plus California State University, Chico at 400 West First Street, Chico City Hall at 411 Main Street, the Chico Unified district offices and the Butte College Chico Center on Forest Avenue. For any of these, put the department or floor in the note. A lobby receptionist can find a name; a building cannot.

The residential half of Chico birthday volume moves through neighborhoods that have genuinely different front doors. The Avenues — the numbered West avenues running First through Eleventh off The Esplanade, crossed by Oleander, Magnolia and Sherman — are 1920s and 1930s bungalows with deep shaded porches, street parking on both sides, and a share of houses now split into student rentals with one shared front door and no working bell. Chapmantown, east of the tracks between East Eighth and East Twentieth, and the Barber neighborhood down by Park Avenue are older cottages on narrow lots. California Park, off East 20th around its lake, and Canyon Oaks up on Yosemite Drive are newer, gated in places, and often require a code. North Chico off Cohasset Road and Keefer Road toward the municipal airport runs to larger lots and long driveways. Out past the city line, Durham and the orchard roads toward the Midway are rural addresses where the mailbox and the house are not in the same place. Tell us which one applies and the drop stops being a guess.

Then there is the weather, which in Chico is not small talk. July and August here run 100 to 108 degrees for days at a stretch in the flat valley heat, and a bouquet left on a west-facing Avenues porch at four in the afternoon in August is not a birthday present, it is a compost demonstration. Summer birthdays want a morning slot and a person at the door, or a plant in a pot that can take the ride. December and January bring the valley's tule fog, which can drop visibility on Highway 99 and the Midway to a few car lengths and turns a Durham or Gridley run into a slow one. May is the busiest floral week of the Chico year by a wide margin — commencement fills University Stadium and every hotel room from The Esplanade to Business Lane, and the shop is baking graduation work at the same time your birthday order lands. August move-in week does the same thing on a smaller scale. None of that stops a delivery; all of it argues for ordering a day ahead rather than at lunch.