Romantic flowers in Fort Collins

The second thing that shapes this category here is the university, and it produces a very particular order: someone in Texas, California or Illinois sending flowers to somebody living in a Colorado State residence hall or a rented house four blocks off campus. A courier cannot knock on a dorm room door. The arrangement is signed for at the hall's front desk — Corbett, Parmelee, Braiden, Durward, Newsom, Westfall and the rest each have their own entrance — and the student is asked to come down and collect it, which only happens if the order carries the hall name, their full legal name as the university has it, and a working mobile number. An order that says only Colorado State University is a guess across a campus of more than a hundred buildings whose core is closed to vehicles anyway. Off campus, the same order moves half a mile west into the Campus West blocks along Elizabeth Street, City Park Avenue, Plum Street and West Prospect, where the obstacle changes from a desk to a locked lobby and the fix is a unit number. Then there are the shared houses on the Laurel, Remington, Whedbee and Peterson blocks of the old grid, where five tenants share one doorbell and half the mailboxes carry a name that moved out two leases ago. For those, a phone number is not optional. And a note that saves grief: if you are sending to somebody whose address you are not entirely sure of, send it to their workplace, or ask. A romantic gesture that ends up in a stranger's living room is not a romantic gesture.

Then there are proposals, which in Fort Collins happen outdoors more often than indoors and therefore need a plan rather than a delivery. The places people actually propose here — the overlooks along Horsetooth Reservoir, the summit rocks up the Horsetooth Rock trail, the meadows in Lory State Park, the bridge over the Poudre on the river trail, the top of the Spring Creek trail, or Old Town Square at dusk — have one thing in common: no courier can deliver to any of them. There is no address, no recipient standing at a door and, on half of Horsetooth, no usable mobile signal to coordinate with. So the flowers go somewhere else and travel with you. Three workable versions. Order a wrapped presentation bouquet rather than a vase arrangement, collect it or have it delivered to your own address that morning, and carry it — a sleeved hand-tied survives a car and a short hike; a glass vase full of water does not. Or have it delivered to the house for the return, so the thing waiting when you get back down the hill is the evening's second surprise. Or, if the proposal ends at a hotel, deliver to the front desk of The Elizabeth on Chestnut Street or The Armstrong on South College with the reservation name and check-in date, and arrange the in-room placement with the property yourself, since that is their call and not a florist's to promise. Ask the studio for a low-water, sturdy build if it is going to be carried; they will know what that means.