Love Romance flowers in Royal Oak

Royal Oak is the rare metro Detroit suburb where a romantic evening does not require a car. The blocks of Main Street, Washington Avenue and West Fourth between Eleven Mile and Lincoln hold the restaurant, bar and music density that draws couples in from Troy, Clawson, Berkley, Madison Heights and half of Macomb County on a Friday night — the Royal Oak Music Theatre on West Fourth pulls a crowd that then eats within three blocks of it, and the Detroit Zoo's winter light run at Ten Mile and Woodward has quietly become a December date for people who have no children with them. What that means for flower delivery is specific and worth planning around: a large share of romance orders in this city go to apartments built above those storefronts in the last fifteen years, not to houses. Those buildings have a locked lobby and a callbox, not a porch, and a courier standing outside one without a unit number and a phone number loses the window. Put the unit on the order. If the building has a package room or a desk, say so. That one line is the difference between flowers on a kitchen island at six o'clock and a re-attempt tomorrow.

The other half of romance volume goes to the houses, and Royal Oak's housing stock makes that easy and its weather makes it hard. South of Twelve Mile the city is brick bungalows on small lots with front doors a few steps off a public sidewalk — no gate, no code, nothing to negotiate. But there is also nothing to shelter behind, and this is Michigan. From December into March an unattended bouquet on a Royal Oak porch is finished in under half an hour: the vase water chills, the outer petals glass over, and the arrangement you paid for at two o'clock is brown by dinner. February 14 falls in the worst stretch of that window. Our shops cold-sleeve and stage for it, but the decisive choice is yours at checkout — book an hour when somebody is in, name a neighbor in the notes, or route it to the workplace. Tell us the house will be empty and the studio will not leave anything on the step; it holds and tries again. That is the correct behavior and it is also the reason we ask for a mobile number rather than only an address.

Four pieces of advice that have nothing to do with flowers and everything to do with whether this works. Do not send romantic flowers to a restaurant — downtown Royal Oak's rooms are small and busy, the bouquet ends up on a bar back and then in a footwell, and the gesture evaporates. Send it to the apartment or the house in the late afternoon so the evening starts at the door. Do not send to a workplace if the relationship is new or private; a bouquet on a desk in a Troy or Southfield office tower is a public announcement, and if you are not certain that is wanted, the home address is the safer read. Do write a real card — the flowers last a week and the card gets kept in a drawer for years, so use full sentences and sign it with your name. And plan around the two weekends when the roads here close: on Dream Cruise Saturday in August the avenue itself becomes the event and the cross streets back up behind it for hours, and over Labor Day weekend the downtown festival puts stages and crowds exactly where the apartments over the shops are. Both are lovely reasons to be in this city and both are terrible days to need a courier on Main Street. Order a day ahead, and if your address is inside the festival footprint, give us a side-street entrance.