Norfolk keeps anniversaries on two calendars. There is the date on the marriage certificate, and there is the date the ship came back. In a city built around the largest naval base in the world, a meaningful share of anniversary orders are not placed on the anniversary at all — they are placed for the week a deployment ends, or for the anniversary that was missed six months ago while one half of the couple was at sea, or for the morning of a pier-side homecoming when the flowers cannot go to the pier and have to be waiting at the house instead. That last case comes up constantly and it has a clean answer: a commercial driver does not clear the gates at Naval Station Norfolk, so the delivery goes to the home, and the homecoming photograph happens in a kitchen rather than on a quay. Put the arrival date and a mobile number on the order and the studio will hold to the day you name. The second thing worth knowing is that Norfolk's romantic geography is small and walkable, which makes the logistics easier than in a sprawling market — the hotels, the museum, the historic districts and the water are all inside about two miles of each other.
Dinner and venue geography follows the same compact pattern. Freemason Abbey, in a former 1870s church on West Freemason Street, is the anniversary restaurant most Norfolk couples name first; the Granby Street row downtown and Colley Avenue in Ghent carry most of the rest, and Waterside District on the harbor handles the larger, louder end of the evening. Harbor cruises leave from the downtown waterfront beside Nauticus and the battleship Wisconsin. For couples marking the anniversary where they married, two Norfolk venues recur: the Hermitage Museum & Gardens on North Shore Road, an Arts and Crafts house on the Lafayette River, and the Norfolk Botanical Garden off Azalea Garden Road near the airport, whose azalea collection was planted in 1938 by a Works Progress Administration crew that was largely made up of Black women. Both are ordinary delivery addresses for us, with the usual event caveat: give us the event name and a coordinator's phone number, because a garden or a museum will not accept an unlabeled arrangement for an unknown party. Residential anniversary routes concentrate in Ghent and West Ghent (23517), Freemason and the Mowbray Arch blocks (23507), Larchmont, Edgewater and Lochhaven (23505 and 23508), Colonial Place and Riverview (23509), and the bayfront in Ocean View, East Beach and Willoughby Spit (23503 and 23518).