A Tempe Florist for Mill Avenue, Town Lake, and the Quieter Side of Warner Road

You may not be at Mountain America Stadium when she walks. Plenty of senders aren't. We get a lot of these orders from out of state in the week leading up to commencement, and the question is almost always the same. Will the flowers actually arrive while she's still in the apartment, or while the family's at the celebration lunch, or somewhere in between.

Commencement day is the wrong delivery window for Tempe. Most parents call asking for it. The graduate is in the stadium from one in the afternoon. Her apartment door is locked. Leasing offices in most Tempe complexes hold packages until eight in the evening, which means roses ordered Monday morning for a Monday afternoon ceremony sit in that office through the photos, the lunch, the round at a Mill Avenue restaurant. By the time she gets home, soft petals have already crisped. Bouquets like the Designer's Choice graduation hold up because the disbud chrysanthemums in them don't desiccate the way roses do. Same flowers in the leasing office at six pm, same flowers when she opens the door at nine.

Two questions first. Is the flower going to the funeral home or to the family at home, and is the family Catholic. The first answer changes the format. The second changes whether you should aim for the velorio the night before, when the rosary is said, or for the day of the Mass.

Joan on the velorio service

Velorio flowers in the Hispanic Catholic tradition arrive before the rosary the evening of the wake. White lilies, white roses, sometimes white carnations. Tempe Mortuary on East Southern has been a family-run service since 1963, and the families I talk to who use them tend to want the arrangements there before the prayers begin. Spring brings more of these calls because of where Lent and Easter sit on the Yaqui calendar in Guadalupe and South Tempe. The arrangement going to the family home a week later is a different conversation. Sympathy for the home can carry color. The velorio flowers shouldn't.

Tempe birthdays come from three different worlds. A twenty-two-year-old in a downtown apartment near Mill Avenue. Her aunt at a State Farm desk in Marina Heights. Her grandmother at Friendship Village or Brookdale on Guadalupe Road. Three orders, three different windows, the same call wearing three slightly different shapes.

I steer differently for each one. The college birthday usually goes to a leasing office and waits there for hours, so I push the small-vase format every time. Three roses in a glass cylinder is portable. It doesn't take up the whole desk in a shared apartment. The Marina Heights orders are the easy ones, oddly enough. Reception desks at most of those tower offices accept flowers, and the AC keeps the arrangement holding until five o'clock pickup. Friendship Village I treat like sympathy in tone if not in palette. Bedside tables are small. Strong scent in a memory-care wing is a problem the staff manage, so I avoid it. A simple birthday arrangement for that windowsill is more useful than the largest bouquet on the page.

If the recipient is in an apartment somewhere on the Mill or Apache corridor and you're not sure they'll be home, the small-vase Thinking of You is the safest order I make. Three Freedom roses in a small glass cylinder. It fits a kitchen counter, a hospital tray, the windowsill at Friendship Village, the corner of a desk at any of the corporate towers. The vase comes with the order so the recipient doesn't need to find one. Thinking of You at $59.99 ends up being where I land for about half the Tempe callers who reach this question.