Anniversary flowers in Madison

Hotel rooms are the other half of the volume, and Madison has a compact and genuinely scenic set of them. The Edgewater at 1001 Wisconsin Place sits directly on Lake Mendota with its plaza open to the water, and it is the address most often used for a milestone anniversary in this city. The Madison Concourse on West Dayton, the Hilton attached to Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Terrace on East Wilson, the AC Hotel on North Webster with its top-floor bar, the Park Hotel right on Capitol Square, Graduate Madison up on Langdon near the lake, Hotel Indigo out on the East Washington Capitol East stretch, HotelRED across from Camp Randall on Monroe Street, the Sheraton on John Nolen Drive and the Marriott West in Middleton round it out. Room delivery is standard work, but it is worth calling the property yourself to ask whether the front desk will hold a vase before check-in and whether housekeeping will place it — policies differ hotel to hotel, and no florist can promise what a given property will do.

It helps to plan the flowers around the rest of the evening rather than as a separate errand. A Madison anniversary night usually has a fixed hinge in it — a curtain at the Overture Center on State Street, a Wednesday Concert on the Square in summer, a Kohl Center or Breese Stevens event, a sitter arriving at six. The flowers should be finished business before that hinge. Order in the morning for an afternoon delivery, have them at the house or in the hotel room while you are both still out, and keep the arrangement low enough to sit on a dining table without anyone moving it during dinner. Couples who have done this a few times tend to settle into the same pattern every year: delivery to the house in the afternoon, the walk along the Monona Terrace rooftop or down to the Memorial Union pier if the weather allows, and dinner downtown after.