Proposals are their own category and the most common mistake is handing the flowers to the venue. In New Haven the good proposal spots are outdoors and unstaffed: the summit of East Rock Park, at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument with the whole harbour laid out below it; Lighthouse Point Park in Morris Cove, where the old carousel and the Five Mile Point lighthouse sit on the water; the Wooster Square cherry trees, the Yoshinos planted in 1973 that turn the square pink for about ten days every April and are the single most photographed week in the city; West Rock and Judges Cave; and the Green itself at dusk. None of those has a front desk that can hold a bouquet for you, which means the arrangement should be delivered to you — your apartment, your hotel room, your friend's place nearby — earlier in the day, and you carry it. Ask for a hand-tied wrapped without water rather than a vase arrangement: it travels, it photographs better in a hand than in glass, and it survives a walk up the East Rock trail. If the plan is a restaurant after, the flowers can go home instead and be there when you get back, which spares you carrying them through dinner.
Discretion matters more in romantic deliveries than in any other occasion, and it is worth saying what we do and do not do. The card is hand-written and sealed, and the driver does not read it out; if the recipient shares a flat with roommates and you would rather the bouquet not be announced to the room, put that on the order and the shop will hand it over without a speech. The same goes for workplaces: sending roses to someone's desk is a public act in a way that sending them to a house is not, and in an open-plan office it becomes everybody's conversation for the afternoon. If you are not certain the recipient wants that, send it home. Student addresses need one extra step. Yale's residential colleges take deliveries at the college front desk with a room number, so the order needs the college name — and the student has to come down for it, which means a mobile number on the order. Graduate students and medical students tend to live in Prospect Hill, Dwight, East Rock or the Whitney Avenue apartment corridor, which are ordinary residential drops. Southern Connecticut State University on Crescent Street, Albertus Magnus College on Prospect Street, University of New Haven in West Haven and Quinnipiac in Hamden all route residence-hall deliveries through a central package desk, which closes in the evening — order in the morning, not at the cutoff.