Anniversary flowers in Tempe

A striking share of Tempe anniversaries trace back to the same square mile. Couples meet at Arizona State, stay in the Valley, and twenty years later they are marking the date in a city where the restaurant they went to on a student budget is still open. House of Tricks, the 1920s bungalow at 114 E Seventh Street with the tree-shaded patio, has been the anniversary dinner in this city for decades. Casey Moore's Oyster House in the 1910 house at 850 S Ash Avenue, in the middle of the Maple-Ash bungalow district, is the other one. Four Peaks Brewing occupies the 1892 brick creamery building on East Eighth Street. ASU Gammage - the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed round hall at Mill and Apache - runs the Broadway touring season, and a Gammage night is the most common anniversary evening in Tempe that does not involve a restaurant at all. That matters for flowers because it tells you where the arrangement should be waiting. Not at the restaurant, where it will sit at a host stand for two hours and then ride home in a car in the dark; at the house, that afternoon, so the day starts with it. We deliver to the table only when the couple has arranged it with the venue in advance and someone there has agreed to hold it, and even then a morning delivery to the home is the more reliable version of the same gesture.

The second pattern is the hotel weekend, and Tempe has two distinct hotel clusters. Downtown, within walking distance of Mill Avenue and the campus, are the Omni Tempe Hotel at ASU on East University Drive, Tempe Mission Palms off Fifth Street with its interior courtyard, Canopy by Hilton Tempe Downtown on East University, the AC Hotel on East Rio Salado Parkway looking over Tempe Town Lake, and Graduate Tempe on Apache Boulevard. The second cluster sits at the city's north-west corner along Priest Drive and West Washington Street, four minutes from Sky Harbor's Terminal 4, which is where out-of-town couples land and stay when the anniversary trip is really about seeing family in the East Valley. Hotel deliveries work the same way at all of them: the arrangement goes to the front desk or the concierge under the full name the room is booked in, and staff will not put it in a room before the guest has checked in. Time it to the afternoon of arrival, include the check-in date, and if the surprise depends on the room being ready, call the hotel yourself the morning of - a florist can guarantee the delivery, but only the hotel can guarantee the room.

Residential anniversary delivery in Tempe is where the calendar does the most work. Between November and April this is one of the easiest delivery markets in the country - mild, dry, and full of people who eat dinner outside on a patio. Between May and September it is one of the hardest. A vase left on a west-facing Tempe doorstep at three in the afternoon in July is standing in air well above 110 degrees, and the arrangement is ruined before anyone opens the door. So for a summer anniversary we route the morning, and we ask two questions that sound fussy and are not: will someone be home, and is the front door shaded. In Maple-Ash and Mitchell Park the answer is usually yes - those are 1920s and 1930s bungalow streets with deep porches. In Broadmor off Mill and Broadway, in the ranch streets of 85282 around Escalante, along the water in The Lakes at McClintock and Baseline, and out in Warner Ranch, Circle G and the big-lot Kyrene streets of 85284, the front entries are often exposed. If nobody will be home, a garage-side shaded entry, a neighbor, or a gated community's guard house beats a doorstep, and for an apartment on Apache or Rural the leasing office is the right answer rather than a locked lobby.