Lincoln happens to be built for this occasion. The city is a grid with short blocks, legible house numbers and a delivery radius you can cross in twenty minutes outside of a game-day Saturday, and the everyday neighborhoods each have their own front-door character. The Near South (68502) off South Street is the friendliest porch stock in the city — 1920s bungalows, deep front steps, mature trees, numbers you can read from the curb. University Place and Bethany (68504) and Havelock (68507) north of O keep their own commercial strips and their own pace; a delivery there frequently ends with a conversation. College View and Piedmont (68506) run out past 48th around Union College, small lots and walkable streets. Sheridan Boulevard and the Country Club blocks (68502, 68506) have deep setbacks and side doors nobody uses. The Antelope Park and Sunken Gardens streets (68510) sit in the middle of everything. Downtown and the Haymarket lofts (68508) need a buzzer code. The newer rings — Van Dorn and Yankee Hill (68512), Pine Lake Road, Wilderness Ridge and SouthPointe (68516), the Highlands, Fallbrook and Air Park (68521) — are further apart and worth a subdivision name in the note, because street names repeat out there. And the 60-mile search reaches Waverly, Hickman, Bennet, Firth, Roca, Crete, Seward, Milford, Wilber, Ashland, Wahoo, Palmyra, Syracuse and Beatrice, which is where a lot of Lincoln's mothers and grandmothers actually live.
What arrives in a Lincoln just-because arrangement should track the week rather than a catalogue, and because this occasion is not locked to a date you can actually take advantage of that. April is tulip, daffodil and iris. The last week of May and the first of June is the peony window — short, spectacular, and the single best value in the Nebraska flower year — with lilac overlapping it. July and August bring zinnia, celosia, sunflower and hydrangea, the designs that hold up on a hot porch. September and October are dahlia, rudbeckia, amaranth, ornamental grasses and, later, bittersweet and mums — the most interesting texture of the year and the least ordered. November through March runs on garden roses, lisianthus, ranunculus, tulip, stock and evergreen, all brought in rather than cut locally. In market season, incidentally, the Haymarket Farmers' Market at 8th and P on Saturday mornings from May into October will sell you a bunch yourself — which is the point of a delivered arrangement: it is for the weeks when you are not in Lincoln, or not free on a Saturday, or the person you are thinking about is the one who never buys flowers for themselves.