Love Romance flowers in Durham

The romance order that goes wrong in Durham almost never fails at the florist; it fails at a locked lobby door. This is a city of converted buildings and new mid-rises — the old tobacco warehouses downtown turned into lofts, the apartment blocks that grew up around the American Tobacco Campus and Golden Belt, the towers on Main and Corcoran, the graduate-student buildings strung along Erwin Road and behind Ninth Street, and the big garden complexes out toward Southpoint, Woodcroft and Parkwood in 27713. Every one of them has a different rule about who can be buzzed in and where a package lives once it is inside. So the difference between a surprise and a voicemail is usually three lines in the notes: the callbox name or code, the building and unit number, and whether the leasing office holds packages and until what hour. If the leasing office closes at five and your partner gets home at six-thirty, say so — the studio would rather make a second attempt in the evening than leave roses on a stoop in July. If there is a front desk, the desk is the safest target. If there is nothing, ask us to call on arrival rather than ring twice; a bouquet photographed on a doormat is a worse surprise than one handed over.

Durham's romantic calendar is unusual because two universities set it. Duke's graduate and professional schools — medicine, law, business at Fuqua, divinity, engineering, the PhD programs — run on a different rhythm than the undergraduate year, and so does UNC nine and a half miles west. That produces a steady stream of orders that look nothing alike: the long-distance partner sending into a studio apartment near Erwin Road during a thesis week, the couple in a first year of residency at Duke Health who overlap for four waking hours a day, the undergraduate who needs a bouquet routed to a residence-hall front desk under a full enrolled name because no campus building will let a driver upstairs. Then there is the rest of the city, which does date night downtown: DPAC on Vivian Street, the Carolina Theatre on Morgan, Motorco and The Pinhook for a show, the Nasher Museum of Art on Duke's campus, Sarah P. Duke Gardens for the free version, and the restaurant blocks at American Tobacco, Brightleaf Square, Ninth Street and Foster Street. Flowers and a show do not mix well in the same hour — nobody wants to hold a vase through a two-hour set — so the better sequence is flowers delivered home in the afternoon and the evening left unencumbered.

On roses, we will be straight with you. Red roses are the default request in February and a perfectly good one the rest of the year, and every studio on this bench builds them. But central North Carolina has a genuine specialty cut-flower scene, and the growers who sell Saturday mornings at the Durham Farmers' Market at Durham Central Park supply a look that an imported long-stem rose cannot: ranunculus and anemone in late winter, tulips and sweet peas in spring, dahlias and zinnias and lisianthus through the long Piedmont summer, celosia and chocolate cosmos into October. If your person is the sort who notices what things are, a seasonal garden-style hand-tied often reads as more thought than a dozen red roses, and it will usually be fresher, because it did not spend four days in a cold chain. Ask for "local and seasonal, garden style" in the notes and the studio will build to what actually came in that week. If red roses are the point — and sometimes they are exactly the point — say the number you want and let the shop tell you what the stems look like that day rather than ordering by photograph.