Romantic flowers in Mayfield Heights

The rest of the year, romance orders here split cleanly by housing. The condominium and apartment blocks along Marsol Road and the Mayfield Road corridor hold a lot of the city's younger couples and its recently single, and those buildings route through a leasing or management office that closes around five — which is exactly when a romantic delivery wants to arrive. The fix is a mobile number on the order so the driver can call up rather than leave a bouquet with a building manager overnight. The postwar houses on the streets off Ridgebury Road and between Mayfield and the Gates Mills line are simpler: porch, doorbell, done, except in January when a wrapped arrangement left outside freezes within the hour. Toward Pepper Pike and Gates Mills the driveways get long and a few entries are gated, so a callback number outperforms a gate code. And there is a workplace version of this order that deserves one honest sentence: a dozen red roses delivered to a partner's desk at Parker Hannifin on Parkland Boulevard, a Landerbrook suite or a Hillcrest nurse station is a wonderful surprise for some people and a mortifying one for others. You know which. If you go that route, order early enough to beat a five o'clock exit, because a bouquet that arrives at 4:50 in a badge-controlled lobby usually waits until morning.

If flowers are one part of a larger evening, the ten-mile ring around Mayfield Heights is unusually well stocked. Little Italy sits at the far western end of Mayfield Road — the same road the city is named for — in the Murray Hill blocks below Lake View Cemetery, where Guarino's has occupied its building since 1918 and La Dolce Vita and the Presti's and Corbo's bakeries fill out the block. Beachwood's Chagrin Boulevard and Richmond Road hold the nearest fine-dining cluster, with Giovanni's Ristorante and Red the Steakhouse at the special-occasion end. Legacy Village on Cedar Road in Lyndhurst and Eton Chagrin Boulevard in Woodmere are the walkable evenings; East 4th Street downtown is the restaurant row twenty minutes west. For the proposal end of the spectrum, this grid has genuinely good scenery inside the radius: Chagrin Falls, the village with a waterfall in its center ten miles southeast; Squire's Castle, the stone gatehouse shell in the North Chagrin Reservation; the Cleveland Botanical Garden and the Cleveland Museum of Art in University Circle; Severance Hall and the Cleveland Orchestra; and the Holden Arboretum out in Kirtland. A word on restaurant delivery, learned the hard way: a bouquet sent to a host stand is a bouquet the couple babysits through dinner and then carries out to a cold car. Send it to the house before they leave.