Birthday flowers in Edison

The thing most likely to derail an Edison birthday delivery is the word Edison. The township is one of New Jersey's largest, well past a hundred thousand residents, and it carries three deliverable ZIP codes — 08817 through the middle, 08820 across the north, 08837 down in the Raritan Center flats — plus PO-box-only numbers that look like street ZIPs to a checkout form and are not. Edison also wraps entirely around the borough of Metuchen, so an address that reads Edison, NJ can be four minutes from Metuchen's Main Street or five miles away at a dock off Sunfield Avenue, and nothing in the address itself tells a driver which. Give us the ZIP, and give us the section if you know it: Clara Barton and Bonhamtown on the Amboy Avenue side, Piscatawaytown along Woodbridge Avenue, Nixon and Stelton to the west, Menlo Park around Christie Street, Oak Tree and New Dover up in the 08820 half. If you have neither, a landmark still works. Menlo Park Mall at Route 1 and Parsonage Road, or Roosevelt Park on the other side of Route 1, puts the run in the right quarter of the township, and a mobile number for the recipient closes the remaining gap faster than any note in the address field.

Residential birthdays split along the rail line. North Edison, 08820, is mostly single-family blocks off Inman Avenue, Oak Tree Road and Grove Avenue — driveways, storm doors, side entrances — and a bouquet left on a step there in July will cook by the time somebody gets home from work. Ask for the delivery to be handed over, or name a shaded spot, or send it to the workplace instead. The garden-apartment and townhouse complexes scattered through 08817 have the opposite problem: a locked lobby, a leasing office that closes at five, and a building number that mapping apps resolve to the wrong entrance. The complex name plus the building letter solves it. Closest benches to the centroid, in order: Robert's Florals at 114 Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, two miles out on the Route 27 line that continues straight into Edison; Mohn's Florist at 2325 Plainfield Ave in South Plainfield, 4.7 miles, on the same Plainfield Avenue that runs down through the township's west side; Mainstreet Florists Outhriver at 181 Main Street and Deocorationsdelaluz at 51 Jackson St, both in South River at 5.1 miles; Floreriaprincipedepaz at 777-E Somerset St in Somerset, 5.6 miles; and Flowers Tation at 9 Veronica Ave in Somerset, six miles.