An Ewing anniversary almost never happens in Ewing. The township has an airport on Terminal Circle Drive, a college on Pennington Road, three corporate campuses and a great many quiet streets — and no hotel row, no restaurant strip, no square. So the evening is a decision about which direction to drive, and this is the rare market where the direction genuinely changes the flower order. North up Route 29, hugging the Delaware and the canal, lands you in Lambertville and a two-minute walk over the free bridge into New Hope — the closest thing this county has to an inn district. West across the Scudder Falls crossing puts you in Yardley, on the Pennsylvania bank, ten minutes from your own driveway. East on Route 1 or 206 is Princeton — Palmer Square, Witherspoon Street, the hotels out on the Carnegie Center side. Southeast is Hamilton and Grounds For Sculpture, with Rat's Restaurant inside it, which is the single most-booked special-occasion room in Mercer County. Tell us which direction you picked and the rest of the order follows from it.
If the plan is dinner, send the flowers home instead — and in this county there is a specific reason for that beyond the usual one. Mercer County's best dining is overwhelmingly BYOB, because New Jersey liquor licenses are scarce and expensive enough that most good rooms simply do without one. That means a table on an anniversary night in Hopewell, Lambertville, Princeton or Yardley already has a bottle on it, a cooler or a bucket beside it, bread, and two glasses the server brought over — there is no square foot left for an arrangement, and no staff member with a spare hand for it. The rooms Ewing couples actually book bear this out: the Yardley Inn on East Afton Avenue looking over the river, Rat's inside Grounds For Sculpture on Sculptors Way, the Palmer Square and Witherspoon Street rooms in Princeton, the farm-table places up in the Hopewell Valley. None of them is built to store a bouquet through two seatings. Deliver to the house in the afternoon. The flowers are on the kitchen table when you leave and still there at eleven when you get back, which is the better half of the evening anyway.