Romance has a calendar in the Sonoran Desert, and it is not the one the greeting-card industry uses. Late February through April is when this city is at its most persuasive: the palo verdes go electric yellow in April, ocotillo whips put out red tips, and by May the saguaros are crowned with the white blossoms that serve as Arizona's state flower - a bloom that opens at night and is finished by the following afternoon, which is about as romantic a piece of botany as the continent offers. Then the monsoon arrives in July and the whole basin turns green and smells like creosote after the first storm, which anyone who grew up here will tell you is the actual smell of being in love in Tucson. Flowers sent in this city land inside that calendar. A February bouquet arrives into the best weather of the year; an August bouquet arrives into 104 degrees and an evening thunderstorm, and it needs to be handled accordingly. Both work. They just do not work the same way.
Where the flowers go is its own local map. The residential surprise is the most common order we see: Sam Hughes and Blenman-Elm on the university side, the barrios ringing downtown in 85701, Colonia Solana and the El Encanto blocks near Reid Park, midtown off Grant and Speedway, Midvale Park on the southwest side, Rita Ranch and Civano out southeast, the walled foothills lots in 85718 and 85750, Casas Adobes and Oro Valley to the northwest. A surprise depends on the driver finding the right door, so the note earns its keep here: gate code, casita or guest house, side entrance, which dog. The second big category is the university district, where Ingli's Florists on East Broadway in 85719 is the nearest partner. Residence halls route deliveries through a front desk rather than a room door, student apartments along Speedway and Park have locked lobbies and parcel rooms that will not take a vase, and the Sun Link streetcar corridor that connects downtown to Fourth Avenue and Main Gate Square is exactly where most of that romance is happening. Include the hall or complex name, a unit number and a mobile number and it works.
The date itself usually ends up downtown, on Fourth Avenue, or up against the mountains, and none of those are places a bouquet should go. Dinner downtown at El Charro Cafe on North Court Avenue or Cafe Poca Cosa, a table at Maynards in the old train depot with freight cars rolling past, tacos on South Fourth Avenue at Mi Nidito, drinks on Congress Street - the host stand will often hold an arrangement, but small rooms frequently have nowhere cool to keep one, and a bouquet parked beside a service station for three hours arrives looking like an afterthought. The mountain version is worse: a sunset drive to Gates Pass, a hike in Sabino Canyon, a drive up Mount Lemmon from saguaro forest to ponderosa pine in forty-five minutes, or the view from Sentinel Peak - there is no address to deliver to on any of them, and national park and forest land is not a delivery destination. The move that works is flowers to the house or the hotel room in the afternoon, so the evening can be the evening and nobody is carrying a vase up a trail.