As for why people here send them, there is a reason that belongs to this city and almost nowhere else on our map. A serious share of Goose Creek households are attached to the Weapons Station side of Joint Base Charleston, and at any given time a number of those houses are being run by one person while the other is at a school, on orders, or underway. Nobody sends flowers for that. It is not a birthday, nobody is ill, and the person holding it together will tell you they are fine. It is, in practice, the best just-because order in this market — the neighbour three doors down in Devon Forest who has done six months of school runs on her own, the friend in Brickhope in month four of a deployment, the family that has moved twice in three years and is doing the whole thing again. The other everyday reasons are the ordinary ones, and they work: the neighbour who ran a mower over your verge while you were away, the person who watched the dog, the friend who has had a stupid month, the new household that has just closed on one of the houses still going up at the Carnes Crossroads and Cane Bay end of the county. Say the reason in the card. A no-occasion bouquet with a specific sentence on the card is worth three of them with nothing written.
The Lowcountry calendar decides how this delivery goes, and it is not decoration. From late spring to the end of September, an afternoon here is genuinely hot and the humidity makes it worse — cut stems left standing in the open on a porch go over in an hour or two, and the late-day thunderstorm is close to a daily event in high summer. Fire ants find a box set on concrete faster than the recipient does. So put a line on the order saying whether the driver may leave it, and where: a covered porch, a side door out of the sun, a screened area, or — much the best option on these streets — with a named neighbour, because a town working rotating shifts always has somebody home next door. Then there is hurricane season, which runs from June into November and is a real operational fact rather than a caveat. When a storm is genuinely tracking toward the Lowcountry, deliveries stop before the weather does: shops close, crews go home to board up, fuel and traffic go strange, and an order placed on the Tuesday for the Thursday may not run. If a named storm is in the forecast, order early in the week or wait until after. On the other side of the year, this is one of the easiest delivery climates in the country — a January porch in Goose Creek is perfectly kind to a bouquet, and the spring, when the azaleas are out across the Lowcountry, is the best month of the year to send someone flowers for no reason.