An anniversary delivery in this market usually comes down to one question: which side of the Intracoastal, and what time does the receiving desk stop taking things. Every route from the mainland to Palm Beach island crosses the Flagler Memorial, Royal Park or Southern Boulevard bridge, and all three lift on a schedule for marine traffic, which means an island run can lose ten to fifteen minutes to a bridge that a mainland run never loses. Between November and April, when the season is on and Worth Avenue is busy, that gap widens. So the shops on this grid plan island anniversary deliveries early in the day and mainland ones later. The other half of the question is the building. The Breakers at 1 S County Road, the Flagler-era resort that still anchors the island, The Colony on Hammon Avenue, The Brazilian Court on Australian Avenue and Eau Palm Beach Resort and Spa down in Manalapan all receive deliveries at a bell desk or a service entrance rather than at a room door, and none of them will put an arrangement in a room before the guest has checked in unless someone on staff agrees to hold it. Give us the reservation name exactly as it was booked, the check-in date, and a mobile number, and the run gets built around those three facts.
One pattern worth planning for is the anniversary that comes back to where the wedding was. A lot of couples in this county were married on this water — the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea at 141 S County Road and the garden beside it, the Royal Poinciana Chapel on Cocoanut Row next to Flagler's Whitehall, the lawns and terraces the island hotels use, the Norton Museum of Art on South Dixie Highway, the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens on Barcelona Road — and many of them come back on the date, often decades later, sometimes for a vow renewal in the middle of the season. If that is your anniversary, tell the shop what the wedding flowers were. A designer who knows it was white phalaenopsis and stephanotis in 1989, or a blush garden-rose bouquet in 2014, can echo the palette in a way that no catalogue description can capture, and every one of the five benches on this grid will ask if you volunteer it. The other version of the same order is the party: a fortieth or fiftieth celebrated in a country-club dining room or an HOA clubhouse in Wellington, Royal Palm Beach or one of the 55-plus communities. Clubhouses are staffed addresses rather than private ones, so the order needs the event name, the date, the room, and a contact who will be there to sign — without those it goes to a locked social room and waits for Monday.