Romantic flowers in Louisville

Then there is February 14, which behaves like nothing else in the flower year. Valentine's Day is the largest single-day cut-flower event in the country, red roses are the most contested stem in it, and every part of the chain tightens at once: wholesale rose prices climb weeks ahead, designers work through the night, same-day intake closes early or stops entirely, and delivery windows widen from a couple of hours to all day. Three things follow for Louisville specifically. First, order three to five days ahead — Valentine's is not a same-day occasion in a six-shop market. Second, consider not buying a dozen red roses: ranunculus, lisianthus, tulips, anemones or a garden-style mixed hand-tied usually look better for the same money in a week when roses are at their most expensive. Third, plan for the weather, because mid-February here runs from mild rain to a hard freeze, and blooms left on an unattended porch in a twenty-degree wind are finished in minutes. If the 14th falls midweek, decide early whether the delivery goes to a workplace during the day or to the house that evening, because trying to switch it on the morning of is the one request no shop in the city can absorb that week.

Where romance actually lands here is worth being concrete about. The Highlands — the Original Highlands, Tyler Park, Bonnycastle, Belknap and the Douglass Loop, in 40204 and 40205 — is the densest concentration of couples in the city, and the stretch of Bardstown Road and Baxter Avenue between them carries most of the date-night traffic: the bars, the small dining rooms, Jack Fry's and Lilly's among them. NuLu along East Market in 40202 is the newer version of the same thing, galleries and restaurants under loft apartments, with Rabbit Hole and the Whiskey Row distilleries — Old Forester, Michter's, Evan Williams, Angel's Envy, Peerless — a few blocks west for the bourbon-tour version of a date. Old Louisville in 40203 puts couples behind Victorian doors, including the pedestrian-only St. James and Belgravia courts where a driver parks on Third or Fourth and walks in. Clifton and Crescent Hill (40206) along Frankfort Avenue are the quieter equivalent. For an evening out, downtown holds the Louisville Palace on South Fourth, the Kentucky Center on West Main, Actors Theatre, and Waterfront Park with the Big Four Bridge, the pedestrian span that walks you over the Ohio into Jeffersonville and is lit at night — Louisville's most-used date walk, and the reason so many proposals here happen within a mile of the river. Cherokee Park, one of the three Olmsted-designed parks in the city along with Iroquois and Shawnee, is the other proposal ground, usually the Scenic Loop and Big Rock.