Romantic flowers in Haymarket

The second question is where the flowers should go, and romance is the one occasion where a workplace is usually the wrong answer even when it is the convenient one. A bouquet on a desk is a public event. It is seen by a row of colleagues, it invites questions, and if the relationship is new, or private, or complicated, the gesture arrives with an audience attached. There is also a mechanical problem particular to this corridor: much of the employment within reach of these shops sits in secured buildings. The office parks around Westfields in Chantilly, plenty of the Godwin Drive industrial sites in Manassas, and a fair number of the contracting suites along Route 29 will not let a courier past a lobby desk, so the arrangement is signed for by a guard and sits in a foyer until somebody is fetched. Sometimes that is fine. Often the home address is simply better: Dominion Valley, Piedmont, Regency, Greenhill Crossing, the historic blocks off Washington Street, or the townhouses and apartments on the Gainesville and Bristow side. Ask yourself whether you want this to be witnessed. If not, send it to a door.

Doors here come in two kinds and they need different notes. A single-family house in one of the master-planned communities needs a gate code written into the delivery instructions — the community name alone is not enough — plus the house number, since the lanes inside these developments are a few names in rotation and a quarter of an hour spent circling is how a surprise turns into a phone call. A townhouse or apartment on the Gainesville side needs the building and unit, and a decision made in advance about the leasing office: some will accept a delivery and hold it, which is safe but tells the recipient before you do, and some will not accept one at all, which leaves a vase at a door. Either way, put a mobile number on the order. If nobody is home, pick the spot yourself and write it down — the side entrance, the shade under the overhang, inside the storm door — because a Virginia afternoon on a west-facing step will cook cut flowers in under an hour and roses give up before anything else in the van. And if you intend to be standing there when the van pulls up, say so, and ask for a knock rather than a drop.

Two closing thoughts, one practical and one about the card. The practical one is that a large part of this market now works from home at least some of the week, and that quietly solves the hardest problem on this page. If she is at her own kitchen table on a Wednesday, a midday delivery is taken by the person it was meant for — no gate call, no neighbour holding a vase, nothing wilting on a step. If you know which days those are, buy one of them; it is worth more than any upgrade to the arrangement. The card is the other. Write it yourself instead of choosing a line from a list: a shop will hand-write whatever you type, and four specific words about one particular Tuesday beat a paragraph of florist prose every time. If you want it unsigned, we will leave your name off the card, though the shop still needs your details to take the order — and be honest with yourself that an unsigned bouquet at a door reads as a puzzle rather than a romance unless she can work out who sent it.