Anniversary flowers in Dearborn

Dearborn has a particular claim on anniversaries that almost no American city can match: the man who built the place kept his own marriage at the center of it. Fair Lane, the house Henry and Clara Ford lived in from 1915 until their deaths, still stands on the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus off Evergreen Road, and the couple's fifty-nine years together are documented in the estate and in the museum complex a mile south. The Dearborn Inn on Oakwood Boulevard was Ford's own hotel, opened in 1931 beside his airfield and generally recognized as the first hotel in the world built to serve an airport; it has been through a long restoration and it is still the most romantic room key in the city. Across Oakwood, Greenfield Village holds the Martha-Mary Chapel, where couples have been married for generations and where a startling number of metro Detroit couples come back on a round-number anniversary to stand in the same doorway. The Henry, off Town Center Drive next to Fairlane, is the city's other full-service hotel and the one that handles most of the corporate-traveler and out-of-town-family anniversary stays. Any of those four addresses is a straightforward anniversary delivery for us, and each has its own front-desk habit — which is the thing worth getting right before you order.

Hotel anniversary deliveries succeed or fail on three details, and none of them are about the flowers. First, the reservation name: a hotel will not take in a delivery for a guest it cannot find in the system, so give us whatever name the room is booked under — which is not always the name of the person you are surprising. Second, the date and the check-in time: if the arrangement arrives before the room is released, the front desk holds it — which is fine for a vase but not for an arrangement you wanted waiting on the bed. Housekeeping placement is a courtesy, not a guarantee, and it has to be arranged by the guest or by you directly with the hotel; we can time the delivery to make it possible, but we cannot promise a staff member will carry it upstairs. Third, a mobile number: the one call that saves a hotel delivery is the courier reaching the sender when the desk says the guest has not checked in. For the Dearborn Inn, the Oakwood Boulevard address puts the drop about two miles from the centroid; for The Henry, the Fairlane office cluster around it means afternoon traffic on the Southfield Freeway service drives is the variable. For either, a morning delivery held at the desk beats an evening delivery that misses the desk.