Anniversary flowers in San Rafael

Anniversaries here have a quiet architectural fact behind them: an enormous number of Marin marriages began at a counter inside the Marin Civic Center on Civic Center Drive, where the county clerk issues licences and performs civil ceremonies, which makes Frank Lloyd Wright's last major commission the wedding venue of record for people who never intended to have a wedding venue. Couples who did it that way tend to mark the date with a dinner rather than a party, and the flower order that goes with it is a home delivery or a restaurant drop, not a ballroom. The other thing worth knowing about this market is demographic rather than romantic: Marin skews older and long-settled, so a disproportionate share of the anniversary orders on this grid are for the twenty-fifth, the fortieth and the fiftieth, going to a couple who have been in the same Terra Linda Eichler or the same Gerstle Park Victorian since the Reagan administration. Those orders want a different object than a fifth anniversary does. They want something that reads as substantial on a dining table for a week, in a vessel that will be kept and reused, rather than something photogenic for an hour.

San Rafael's own rooms are business rooms, so the night-away half of this category leaves town. The three in-city properties — Embassy Suites at 101 McInnis Parkway, the Four Points on Northgate Drive, and the small Panama Hotel on Bayview Street up in Gerstle Park — exist for visiting relatives and people here to work, which makes them the right address when family have come in for the occasion rather than the couple themselves. What gets booked for an actual anniversary lies twenty to thirty minutes south and west. Cavallo Point at Fort Baker occupies the old army post beneath the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, its lodgings scattered along a parade ground where a room number is the difference between a delivery and a search. Casa Madrona on Bridgeway climbs the hillside above the Sausalito waterfront and the Inn Above Tide is built out over the water below it, both entered from a single street-level door. The Lodge at Tiburon stands a short walk up from the ferry landing on Tiburon Boulevard; the Acqua faces Richardson Bay from Redwood Highway in Mill Valley; the Courtyard at Larkspur Landing sits beside the ferry terminal on East Sir Francis Drake; and Olema House, at the Point Reyes turn, takes the couples who spend the date near the coast. One instruction covers all of them — room number, guest mobile and check-in hour — because a front desk will happily keep an arrangement in a back office until the surprise has expired.

The anniversary order that lands hardest in this county is usually the one addressed to where it happened, because Marin couples marry close to home and then stay put. Falkirk Cultural Center at 1408 Mission Avenue, the city's Victorian mansion and its grounds, has carried a generation of San Rafael weddings. The Marin Art and Garden Center in Ross, out along Sir Francis Drake, has carried several more, as have Deer Park Villa under the redwoods at the Fairfax end of the valley, the Outdoor Art Club in Mill Valley and the Corinthian Yacht Club in Tiburon. McNears Beach and China Camp, out along Point San Pedro Road, are where the informal ones happened, and the county clerk's counter at the Civic Center accounts for a great many of the rest. None of those places will hold flowers for you on an ordinary Tuesday, but naming the room on the card is worth more than an extra dozen stems, and if the couple are going back for dinner or a walk, timing a home delivery for the hour they return beats anything handed over on site. If you do want a vase on a restaurant table, ring the room yourself first and tell us the answer — Marin dining rooms are small, one person is on the door, and an unannounced arrangement mid-service becomes somebody's problem while they are plating.