Romance orders behave differently from every other occasion on this rail, because the recipient is usually somewhere with a door between them and the driver. Lexington's romantic addresses are apartments and dorm rooms far more often than houses: the loft conversions along Main, Short and Vine in 40507 and 40508 with buzzer entries nobody answers; the student blocks around campus in 40506 and 40508; the big complexes off Man o' War, Richmond Road, Nicholasville Road and out at Hamburg in 40509, 40503, 40515 and 40517, where a leasing office closes at five and a package room will not take a vase. That is the whole difficulty of this occasion in this city, and it has a one-line solution: put the recipient's cell number on the order. Both studios would far rather text on arrival than leave a dozen roses at a locked entryway in February. Oram Flowers at 825 E Euclid Ave. covers the campus and downtown side of that map in minutes; Nicholasville Florist KY at 206 S Main St, 13.3 miles south, covers Brannon Crossing, the lower Nicholasville Road complexes and Wilmore.
Proposals are their own category and the logistics deserve a paragraph, because the pretty spots in this city are almost all public ground. The Arboretum on Alumni Drive, Jacobson Park, McConnell Springs, Raven Run out on the south edge of the county, the grounds at Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate in Ashland Park, the Keeneland rail on Versailles Road, the fence lines along Old Frankfort Pike and Paris Pike that people drive out of town specifically to look at — a florist cannot stage or hold flowers at any of them, and no delivery van can wait for a moment that may run forty minutes late. What works is one of three plans: flowers to the house or the hotel room for afterward, a pickup at the shop on your way so you carry them yourself, or a delivery to the restaurant where you have already spoken to a manager. Tell the studio it is a proposal and they will build something that photographs rather than something that merely arrives.
The rest of the year, romance in Lexington runs on smaller and better-timed gestures than February's. A Friday-afternoon delivery to a desk at Lexmark on West New Circle Road or the offices around the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government building at 200 East Main, timed for late morning so it is seen and not missed. Flowers waiting at a hotel desk before a weekend at 21c on West Main or Gratz Park Inn, or out at The Kentucky Castle on the Versailles Road, Shaker Village near Harrodsburg or the Beaumont Inn — all inside the 60-mile radius this sparse market runs on. A first anniversary of a first date sent to a dorm front desk during finals week. Long-distance senders are a large share of this rail: a UK student's partner in another state, a couple split between here and Louisville or Cincinnati. For all of those, the cell number and a note about when the recipient is actually home do more for the delivery than the size of the arrangement does.