Anniversary flowers in Walnut Creek

The practical difficulty with an anniversary is that both recipients usually live at the same address, which makes a Tuesday-afternoon doorstep delivery a surprise for exactly the wrong person. Walnut Creek happens to be well supplied with ways around that. Three hotels take front-desk deliveries, and each has its own character: the Walnut Creek Marriott at 2355 North Main Street is six storeys with views toward Mount Diablo and sits two blocks from the BART station, which is why couples from elsewhere in the Bay Area use it for a night in town without a car; the Renaissance Walnut Creek on Jones Road runs a resort-shaped property with pools and hot tubs; and Embassy Suites by Hilton at 1345 Treat Boulevard sits by the Treat corridor on the Pleasant Hill side. What none of them runs is a Manhattan-style concierge operation, and the difference matters to your order: the front desk will hold an arrangement for an arriving guest, but it holds it against a name exactly as the reservation is written plus an arrival date, not against a room number that does not exist until check-in. Send it the afternoon of arrival, not two days early. The second route is dinner. Downtown's restaurant density runs along Locust Street, North Main and the blocks wrapped around Broadway Plaza — the open-air centre that opened in 1951 and still draws the county, with about eighty stores under Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Macy's. A restaurant will very often hold flowers for a booking, and will almost never accept one it was not told about, so make one phone call to the host, give the reservation name and the hour, and ask for the arrangement to arrive in the gap between lunch and dinner service rather than during either. Ask for something low as well: a tall vase on a two-top is a nuisance the table has to solve. Third, the theatre. The Lesher Center for the Arts at 1601 Civic Drive has been running since October 1990 and now presents more than 900 productions and events a year, with the Bedford Gallery inside the same building at the corner of Locust and Civic and the resident Center REPertory Company on its stages. Flowers do not work well *before* a performance — nobody wants to hold a bouquet through two acts — so either send them to the house for afterwards or, if you are congratulating a performer rather than a spouse, send to the venue in the company's name with the performance date and whether it is the matinee or the evening show.