Love Romance flowers in Eau Claire

The rest of the year, romance here divides along a line most markets do not have: the students and everybody else. UW-Eau Claire carries roughly ten thousand of them on a campus the Chippewa River cuts in half, joined by the footbridge, with the Davies Center as the front door and the Water Street apartments and duplexes tumbling off the lower end of it. That population sends and receives an enormous share of this city's romantic flowers, and it needs a different build than a married couple in Putnam Heights does. Send a residence hall delivery wrapped rather than vased — there is no counter space, nothing to cut stems with, and glass in a dorm room ends badly — and expect the hall desk to hold it and call the student down. For the Water Street blocks, give us the apartment number and a mobile number, because the entry doors and buzzers along that stretch are inconsistent and a driver will phone rather than stand in the cold guessing. Chippewa Valley Technical College students are commuters, so home is usually the better address, and UW-Stout in Menomonie sits inside the radius at about twenty-five miles, which makes it a morning order.

Where romance actually happens in this city is worth knowing, because it tells you where the flowers should not go. The classic Eau Claire proposal spots are the confluence itself — Phoenix Park and the footbridge where the Eau Claire River meets the Chippewa — the Chippewa River State Trail heading south out of town, Carson Park on the Half Moon Lake peninsula, and, twelve miles north, Irvine Park and Lake Wissota in Chippewa Falls. Those are all outdoor, mobile and frequently cold, and none of them is a place to deliver an arrangement to. Restaurants are the same trap in a different costume. A dining room downtown or a supper club on a county highway has no back counter for a florist's box and nobody free at five o'clock to take custody of it, so what actually happens is that your bouquet waits by the host stand and gets handed over on the way out. If you are proposing, carry the flowers in yourself or have them sitting at home for afterward. If the night involves a room at The Oxbow or The Lismore, the front desk is the right recipient — give us the reservation surname exactly as booked, and place the order a day ahead, since a desk can take custody of an arrangement hours before a room key exists.