Just Because flowers in Pittsburgh

Everyday deliveries here run into everyday Pittsburgh problems, and the fixable ones are all about the door. A great many addresses in this city are on a Way — an alley behind the main street — and mapping software will happily put a driver on the wrong side of the block with a fence in between; if the house faces a Way, say so. Some official city streets are staircases, particularly on the South Side Slopes, Troy Hill, Fineview and Beechview, where the front door is at the top of a public stairway and the usable entrance is around the back or off the street above. Row houses in Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, Polish Hill and the South Side flats often have no functional front stoop and a household that uses the side or rear door. None of this is a problem for a studio that works the neighborhood daily — but it is a problem for a bouquet with no phone number attached. Add a mobile number and one line of access detail and the delivery rate on these orders goes close to perfect. Between December and March that phone number matters even more: an arrangement left on an unheated porch in Beechview, Ross, Troy Hill or Mt. Washington for a few hours can freeze, and our studios would rather call, hand it to a neighbor or come back than leave it out.

As for what to send when there is no occasion, the honest answer is the smallest thing that is still real. A seasonal hand-tied built from whatever came into the cooler that morning is the most Pittsburgh way to do this — lilac and peonies in the narrow late-May-into-June window, hydrangea, snapdragons, zinnias and dahlias through the summer and into a warm October, sunflowers in August, tulips and flowering branches in March, and imported garden roses, alstroemeria, lisianthus, spray roses and carnations through a long winter. A potted plant is the better call for someone who travels, someone in a dark apartment who wants something that lasts past a week, or a thank-you to a neighbor who shoveled your steps — a pothos or a small green plant keeps going through a February that cut stems will not survive. On the card, skip the explanation. The reason people remember a just-because delivery is precisely that nothing prompted it: name the thing you appreciated, in one sentence, and let the flowers do the rest. Every studio on the grid hand-writes it at no charge.