Anniversary flowers in Palo Alto

If there is a hotel involved, the hotel is the right address, not the restaurant. Palo Alto's rooms are unusually good at this because so many of them are small and staffed rather than large and automated. The Garden Court Hotel on Cowper Street is a courtyard property a block off University with Il Fornaio downstairs, and its desk handles in-room placement as a matter of course. The Cardinal Hotel on Hamilton Avenue has been in the same 1920s building since before most of the city existed. Nobu Hotel Palo Alto on Hamilton runs the restaurant and the rooms together. Along El Camino Real, the Westin and the Sheraton sit a short walk from the Caltrain station and the Stanford Shopping Center, The Clement runs an all-inclusive model where staff are already in and out of the room, Dinah's Garden Hotel keeps its low midcentury buildings around a pool garden, and the Creekside Inn covers the south end. Across San Francisquito Creek and the freeway, the Four Seasons on University Avenue in East Palo Alto and Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park take the milestone bookings. Give a guest name and an arrival time and the desk does the rest.

The long-marriage anniversaries are the ones worth being generous about, and Palo Alto has an unusual number of them, because people who bought here in the 1960s and 70s largely stayed. The addresses repeat: Old Palo Alto and Crescent Park north of Embarcadero, Duveneck/St. Francis and the Community Center blocks near Rinconada, Green Gables and Triple El, the ranch streets of Midtown and Palo Verde, Barron Park, and up in the Palo Alto Hills off Page Mill Road. Two practical notes for those deliveries. Hedges and mature trees hide the house numbers on the older north-side streets, and driveways are long, so a gate note or a phone number saves a lap. And in the hill addresses off Page Mill and Arastradero, a flowering plant or a substantial arrangement is a better gift than a small hand-tied posy, because the recipients are at home all day and the piece is going to be looked at for a week rather than photographed once.

A fair number of Palo Alto anniversaries are marked in a front-desk building rather than a house, and those are the most reliable deliveries in the city. Channing House on Webster Street and Webster House a few doors away, Lytton Gardens on Lytton Avenue, the Moldaw Residences on Charleston Road, Stevenson House on East Charleston and Vi at Palo Alto on Sand Hill Road all have staff who accept an arrangement and walk it to the apartment. Send the resident's full name as the community writes it — desks route by name, not by unit — and keep the arrangement low and weighted, because a two-room apartment there has one small table and a tall vase in a narrow hallway is a hazard rather than a gift. For couples who are both residents, a single arrangement to the apartment beats two smaller ones; for a couple where one has moved into memory or skilled-nursing care and the other has not, the piece goes to the care address and the visiting spouse sees it every day.