Love Romance flowers in Detroit

Romance in Detroit is an indoor sport for five months of the year, and any flower order placed between November and March has to account for that. The temperature on Washington Boulevard in mid-February regularly sits in the teens, the wind comes across a half-mile of open river with nothing to break it, and a bouquet handed off in a parking structure and carried four blocks is a different object by the time it reaches a table. The shops here handle it the way Michigan shops always have: the arrangement gets built cold, sleeved, and often double-wrapped before it leaves the cooler, and the driver keeps it out of the direct blast of a van heater, because heat shock does as much damage as frost. It is also why the smartest Detroit date-night order is not a table delivery at eight o'clock but an afternoon drop to wherever the recipient is getting ready. The flowers spend the evening in water at room temperature instead of riding around in a car, and the surprise lands two hours earlier, when they are still deciding what to wear.

The date itself usually happens in one of about twenty rooms, and the delivery strategy is the same for all of them: send to the person, not the table. The Whitney in the 1894 mansion at 4421 Woodward is the city's default romantic room. Prime + Proper in Capitol Park, the London Chop House on West Congress, Joe Muer on the Renaissance Center riverfront, Selden Standard and Chartreuse in Midtown, Grey Ghost in Brush Park, SheWolf on Cass, Freya in Milwaukee Junction, Marrow on Kercheval, Takoi on the Corktown stretch of Michigan Avenue, Baobab Fare in New Center, and Xochimilco, Armando's and Mexican Village on the Bagley and Vernor blocks of Mexicantown carry most of the reservations. An evening at Cliff Bell's on Park Avenue, a show at the Fox Theatre or the Fillmore on Woodward, the Detroit Opera House on Broadway, Orchestra Hall or the Fisher Theatre in New Center — all of those make the afternoon delivery the only version that survives the night, because nobody wants to check a bouquet at a coat counter. For warm-weather dates, the Detroit Riverwalk, the Dequindre Cut, Campus Martius, and Belle Isle with the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory and the James Scott Memorial Fountain are where the evening goes afterward, and a bouquet is easier carried than balanced.