She lives in an apartment with a locked lobby. How does this work?
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With a phone number. The campus-adjacent blocks along Tennessee, Ohio and Naismith and the converted houses off 9th and 11th Street have no staff to hand a delivery to, so a driver standing at a locked entry with an unlabelled buzzer has nothing to work with. Give us the recipient's mobile, or better, a roommate's — a roommate who knows the surprise is coming solves this completely. Include the unit number and the floor. If nobody can be reached, the fallback is an evening window or a delivery to your own address earlier in the day, which you then carry the last hundred feet yourself.
Should the flowers be waiting at the restaurant, or should I carry them in?
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For a date rather than a milestone dinner, carry them. A downtown room can usually be persuaded to stash an arrangement, but you are then relying on a host who is seating forty people to remember your table at the right moment, and when that slips you are handing over flowers after the plates arrive. Have them delivered to you in the morning instead, keep them out of the sun, and walk in with them. Ask for a design built to be held — wrapped and hand-tied rather than a heavy vase, which is one thing to say in the notes and changes what gets made.
I want to propose at Potter Lake or the Campanile. What do I order?
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Order the flowers to yourself, earlier the same day. None of the places Lawrence couples actually propose — Potter Lake, the ground below the Memorial Campanile, Marvin Grove, the hill overlook toward the Kaw valley, Clinton Lake at sunset, the river levee — can take a delivery, because there is no signature and no water. So the reliable version is a delivery to your address or to a friend's in the morning, kept cool and out of the sun, and carried up the hill by you. Tell us it is for an outdoor proposal and the build is made to survive an hour in a car, which is a different arrangement than one built for a vase.
I am out of state. Can I send flowers to someone at KU without knowing Lawrence?
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Yes, and a lot of these orders come from exactly that position, since the university draws heavily from outside Kansas. You do not need the street grid. What you need is the building — a residence hall by name, Jayhawker Towers, Stouffer Place, or an apartment address with the unit letter — plus a floor if it is a walk-up, and a mobile number. For a residence hall the flowers go to a staffed front desk and the student is called down, which is the easiest version of this order. For a private apartment, the phone number is the whole difference between a delivery and a second attempt.
We are long distance and I am driving in for the weekend. Where do I send them?
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To wherever you are sleeping, arriving the day you do. If that is her apartment, send it for the afternoon of your arrival and let her open the door to it rather than trying to surprise someone who is already expecting you. If you have booked a room downtown or up by campus, the front desk will take an arrangement with a day's notice and the booking name spelled as it appears on the reservation, though whether anybody carries it upstairs before you check in is the hotel's decision and not something to build a plan around. The dependable version is always: flowers to a person, not to a building.
He lives out in the county, not in town. Does that still work?
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It does. The radius here is 60 miles rather than the usual figure, because a couple in this part of Kansas is as likely to be split between Lawrence and a town half an hour away as to live on the same street — the K-10 commute toward Johnson County and the US-59 run south are both ordinary here. A county address needs two extra things from you: the nearest cross road, and a phone number for whoever is receiving it. The second matters more on this page than anywhere else, because on a surprise a call placed to the wrong phone is the one mistake nobody can walk back.