Here is what the neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood reality actually looks like, because it changes what the driver has to do. Around the Green, the Ninth Square and Audubon Street, buildings have lobby desks or intercoms, and a delivery goes to the desk with a phone call after. In East Rock (06511) — Orange Street north of Audubon, Livingston, Cold Spring, the Whitney Avenue side streets — it is buzzers and porches, and a floor or apartment letter is essential. Wooster Square is the same but with the added charm of the CitySeed farmers market running on Saturday mornings in the square, which is the one time a week people there are already thinking about flowers. Fair Haven (06513) along Grand Avenue is dense, walkable, heavily Spanish-speaking, and full of ground-floor businesses where a delivery goes to a shop counter rather than a house door. Westville (06515) behind Whalley Avenue and Beaver Hills are single-family and porch-friendly. The Hill (06519) sits between the hospital complex and the harbour. Morris Cove and the Annex (06512) run out toward Lighthouse Point. The only universal rule: a phone number on the order turns a failed delivery into a knock on a door.
The three most common no-occasion sends in this city are all worth doing properly. Thank-you flowers to a teacher go to a school's main office, not to a classroom — New Haven Public Schools, the interdistrict magnets, and the independent schools all route deliveries through a front desk that pages the teacher, so the order needs the teacher's full name and the school, and the delivery should land mid-morning rather than at dismissal when the office is chaos. New-neighbour and new-baby-at-home flowers are the easiest deliveries we make and the most reliably welcome: a family three days home from the hospital is not going anywhere, and a low arrangement that does not need tending is better than something tall that needs a vase found for it. Thank-yous to a care team — a unit at Yale New Haven, a practice on Howard Avenue, a home-health nurse — should be addressed to the unit or the team rather than one person, because most units prefer a shared arrangement at the nurses' station or in the break room, and because hospital gift policies vary by department. Keep it lily-free and low-pollen for anything going inside a hospital building, and note the unit on the order so the shop builds it that way. There is also the fourth category nobody plans: the apology, the bad week, the friend who has gone quiet. Those do not need a card that explains itself, just one honest sentence.