Anniversary flowers in Mobile

Hotels are the simpler half of the job, and downtown Mobile has an unusual set of them for a city this size. The Battle House on Royal Street keeps a lobby that has been receiving people since the 1850s, with Alabama's tallest building rising directly above it. The Renaissance Riverview Plaza sits on Water Street with the river and the cruise terminal out its windows. The Admiral stands on Government Street in the old commercial core, and the Malaga Inn on Church Street is two 1862 townhouses built around a courtyard, which is the one anniversary address in town where the flowers arguably belong in the courtyard rather than the room. The Fort Condé Inn covers the historic district beside the reconstructed fort. What all of them want is the guest's surname as the reservation reads, the arrival date, and a phone number. What they cannot do is refrigerate, which decides the hour: a bouquet dropped at ten in the morning for a six o'clock check-in stands behind a bell desk for eight hours in a warm lobby. Mid-afternoon is the sweet spot — late enough that the room may be ready, early enough to be well clear of the tunnel.

Restaurant deliveries take a different kind of coordination, and in Mobile one of them is vertical. Dauphin's occupies the top of the RSA Trustmark tower with the whole bay laid out below it, which means a delivery there is a lobby desk, a security check and a single elevator ride — nothing a driver improvises at seven in the evening. Wintzell's Oyster House has been shucking at 605 Dauphin Street since 1938 and runs a room that is genuinely busy, so the arrangement is left with the host stand ahead of service rather than walked to a table mid-meal. The Noble South on Dauphin and Callaghan's Irish Social Club on Marine Street in Oakleigh are both small rooms where a large arrangement on a two-top is a nuisance and a compact one is a gift. The rule that applies everywhere: give us the reservation name and the time, aim the delivery an hour before the booking, and keep the piece low enough that the couple can see each other over it. Remember also that whatever arrives at a restaurant has to travel home on a passenger seat afterward — and if home is across the bay, it makes that same tunnel-and-bridge trip in reverse. Tall and top-heavy does not survive it. One seasonal caveat: from Twelfth Night to Fat Tuesday the downtown parade routes close, and a restaurant inside the barricades cannot be reached at all once the streets shut.

Then there is the anniversary that is not a dinner at all. Mobile couples marry at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on Claiborne Street, at Government Street Presbyterian, in the chapel at Spring Hill College, and out in the gardens — Bellingrath Gardens and Home in Theodore, where the azaleas run in March and the cascading chrysanthemums take over in November, and the Mobile Botanical Gardens beside Langan Park. Decades later the anniversary flowers often try to answer the wedding flowers, and in this city that is an easier brief than most, because Mobile is the Azalea City and a March anniversary here has a colour palette waiting outside the front door. The other pattern worth naming is scale. A golden anniversary in a Mobile family is not two people at a candlelit table; it is a hall with four generations in it, somebody's church, a catered lunch. That calls for a low centerpiece that guests can talk across, and often for several small pieces rather than one large one. The residential side is straightforward by comparison — Midtown off Old Shell, the hedged drives of Spring Hill, the sidewalk-front cottages of Oakleigh, the keypad subdivisions off Cottage Hill and Schillinger, and across the water in Daphne, Spanish Fort and Fairhope.