Love Romance flowers in Palo Alto

Where these deliveries actually land, in rough order of volume: the apartment corridors above, the Midtown and Ventura blocks, College Terrace with its one-way diverters and its grid of streets named for colleges, Barron Park, Green Acres, the Charleston Meadows ranch streets, and the north-side houses in Old Palo Alto and Crescent Park where the hedges hide the numbers. Stanford is its own category and a large one, because thousands of couples here are graduate students and postdocs: the Escondido Village graduate towers, Munger for the law and business students, and the rest of the campus housing stock all take deliveries at a residence or building front desk under a full name, never at an apartment door, and the desks keep office hours rather than campus hours. Flowers to a lab or a department office are workable too, but a named person on a floor beats a building name every time, and nobody should be paging a graduate student out of a seminar to collect a bouquet.

Then there is the date-night geography, which in Palo Alto is unusually compact and unusually walkable — one of the reasons a delivered-at-home bouquet works so well here is that the evening itself does not involve a car. University Avenue and California Avenue hold most of it: the restored 1920s Stanford Theatre at 221 University still runs films with its organ, and the blocks around it have Evvia on Emerson, Bird Dog on Ramona, Zola on Bryant, Tamarine on University, Protégé and Terún on California Avenue, Coupa Cafe, the Palo Alto Creamery on Emerson and the Peninsula Creamery on High Street for the unfussy version. The outdoor equivalents — the boardwalk out into the Baylands at the end of Embarcadero Road at sunset, the Dish loop up in the Stanford foothills, Foothills Nature Preserve off Page Mill — do not take deliveries at all, which is exactly why you carry that bouquet yourself and have it sent to the house for later.