Love Romance flowers in Fort Myers

The most romantic place in Lee County is named Lovers Key, which saves everyone the trouble of arguing about it. It is a state park at the far south end of the beach, past Fort Myers Beach toward Bonita, with a beach you walk out to and the kind of sunset people plan a trip around. It is also, like every beach and every sunset, completely undeliverable. A state park has no front desk, a stretch of sand has no street number, and a driver cannot hand a bouquet to two people who are somewhere along two miles of shoreline at an hour that depends on the clouds. So if the plan involves a proposal, a sunset or an island, invert the sequence: have the flowers delivered hours earlier to the room you are staying in, the restaurant where dinner is booked, or to yourself at the hotel so you carry them out. Practical version, because we get asked: order for a morning delivery to the property, tell us the reservation name, and ask the front desk to hold them out of sight. Then the only thing you are carrying to the beach is the flowers and whatever else is in your pocket.

For an evening that stays on the mainland, downtown is the compact option. The River District along First and Second Street is walkable end to end — the restaurants around the Patio de Leon courtyard, Ford's Garage where the original opened on First Street, the Arcade Theatre where Florida Repertory Theatre performs, the Sidney and Berne Davis Art Center, and the Luminary Hotel on Edwards Drive with the Caloosahatchee in front of it. Three of our six shops are ten minutes from all of it. If the night includes a show, think about the logistics before you order: a bouquet is an awkward thing to hold through two acts at Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall on the Florida SouthWestern campus on College Parkway, or through dinner and a musical at Broadway Palm on Colonial Boulevard. The better play on a theater night is a morning delivery to the house, so the arrangement is already on the counter when you both walk back in — or a low compact piece placed on the dinner table before you arrive, which restaurants in this district will generally do if you give them the reservation name and hour.

There is a version of romance in this county that other cities do not have much of, and it is worth writing for: the couple that is split across two states for half the year. One partner is still working in Ohio or New Jersey through the week and flies into Southwest Florida International every second Friday; the other is already down here. That produces a steady flow of midweek sends to a house where only one person is home, and it changes what works — a delivery timed for a Wednesday afternoon, when the house is quiet and the arrival is the whole point, does more than anything scheduled around a weekend that is already full. The younger half of the market sits further out: the apartment corridors along Colonial Boulevard, Daniels Parkway and Gateway east of Interstate 75, and the residence halls at Florida Gulf Coast University in south Lee County, where deliveries route through a front desk or mail room and a student's full name plus the hall is enough. Workplaces on Metro Parkway and in the Gateway office corridor take flowers at a lobby desk; name the department and the suite.

Valentine's Day in Fort Myers deserves one blunt paragraph. February 14 falls inside the busiest stretch of the entire Southwest Florida season, when the county's population is at its fullest, US 41 and Daniels Parkway are at their slowest, and six local shops are working the heaviest three days of their year with a global rose market that is priced and picked over accordingly. The same month brings the Edison Festival of Light, whose night parade closes downtown streets and will reroute a River District delivery on the evening it runs. None of this is a reason to worry — it is a reason to order three days out instead of at noon on the 14th. Two further tricks that locals use. Send on the 13th: the arrangement is fresher, the shop is calmer, and the surprise of a day early beats the predictability of a day exactly on time. Or send on the 15th with a note about beating the crowd, which is a joke that works on most people. If the 14th itself is non-negotiable and it is going to a workplace, get it in early and give us the suite, the department and a mobile number.