Love Romance flowers in Mobile

The romance map of this city is mostly residential, and each part of it behaves differently at the door. Downtown lofts along Dauphin and St. Louis Street, the townhouses of De Tonti Square and the Church Street East blocks are handsome and difficult in the same breath — locked street doors, no buzzer that reaches the right unit, and in carnival season no parking. A unit number and a phone number turn that into a two-minute stop. Midtown off Old Shell and along Dauphin has the deep shaded porches that make a surprise delivery easy; Oakleigh does not, since the cottages there sit almost on the sidewalk with no driveway and the driver parks down the block and walks. Spring Hill hides its house numbers behind hedges and long drives beneath live oaks. West Mobile off Cottage Hill and Schillinger is keypads and call boxes. Out at the University of South Alabama the residence halls take deliveries at a staffed desk rather than at a room door, which on the fourteenth means a queue — so a morning order is worth a great deal there. And a good share of Mobile's romance addresses are not in Mobile at all: Daphne, Spanish Fort and Fairhope sit across the bay, reached through the Wallace Tunnel and over the Bayway, and that crossing sets its own clock.

A surprise has mechanics, and they are worth spelling out because the most common way a romantic delivery is spoiled is a phone call to the wrong person. Put your own number on the order, not the recipient's, if the whole point is that she does not know. Give the driver a fallback that is not the front door — a workplace, a neighbour, a back gate — because a single missed answer on a Saturday afternoon is what turns a surprise into a card left in a screen door. If the plan involves a restaurant, name it and name the reservation time: Dauphin's sits high in the RSA Trustmark tower above the bay and takes a lobby handoff in the afternoon rather than a table delivery at seven; Wintzell's Oyster House on Dauphin Street has been busy since 1938 and wants flowers at the host stand before service; Callaghan's on Marine Street in Oakleigh and The Noble South downtown are small rooms where a compact piece is a gift and a tall one is an obstacle. If the plan is across the water — the seafood rooms out on the Causeway with the bay under the pilings, or a table in Fairhope — the delivery has to beat the afternoon build-up in the tunnel, which means it leaves Mobile around lunchtime. Hotels are the easiest version: the Battle House on Royal Street, the Malaga Inn courtyard on Church Street and the Admiral on Government all take a bell-desk handoff on a guest surname and arrival date.

Two things about February on the Gulf Coast catch people out. The first is supply, and it is national rather than local: in the week around the fourteenth, red roses are the tightest and most expensive stem in the trade, and a two-bench market cannot conjure more of them than the wholesalers ship. What that means in practice is that the classic dozen red is the first thing to run short and the last thing to be cheap, while a mixed design of the same value is both easier to build well and more likely to arrive when you asked for it. Ordering three or four days out is the single biggest improvement you can make to a Valentine's delivery in this city. The second is the weather, which in a Mobile February is a coin toss — seventy-two degrees and humid one year, a hard freeze the next. Tender petals left on an exposed step overnight in a cold snap burn just as surely as they cook in July, and this is the rainiest major city in the lower forty-eight, so an uncovered porch is a real risk in any season. Ask for a covered spot, a carport or a named neighbour. And if the romance in question is a summer one, the heat rule applies in reverse: nothing survives an afternoon on hot concrete, so aim for morning and give it water indoors straight away.