Flower Delivery Distillery District

Walk Trinity Street on a Saturday and the Distillery District barely feels like a downtown block. The lane is brick-paved and closed to cars, the widest in a 13-acre village of more than forty restored Victorian industrial buildings, the largest collection of its kind in North America. The 1859 Stone Distillery anchors the quarter, the Boiler House chimney rises over the historic core, and Dennis Oppenheim's roughly 50-foot "Still Dancing" sculpture stands near Trinity Street's south end. It's a National Historic Site where chain stores are banned, and one of the city's favourite backdrops for weddings and film.

The district splits between those who live in its glass condo towers, Pure Spirit at 33 Mill Street, Clear Spirit at 70 Distillery Lane and the Gooderham, and those who work inside the old brick: gallerists across more than twenty galleries, actors at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, and the hospitality crews behind Mill Street Brewery and Archeo. Between them they mark engagements at the LOVE Locks, opening nights at Soulpepper, and above all weddings, since venues like the Fermenting Cellar and Cluny make this one of Toronto's marquee wedding quarters. For those milestones, peonies are the natural gift.

Peonies carry more meaning than almost any other bloom: by convention they stand for a happy marriage and are the flower of the twelfth wedding anniversary, so a blush Sarah Bernhardt or coral bouquet fits an engagement, a Distillery District wedding or a milestone at home alike. Ontario's peony season is short, roughly the month of June, so a little peony care goes a long way in season, and for the rest of the year we build the same romantic feeling with garden roses and full mixed bouquets.

The historic core, Trinity Street and Tank House Lane, is closed to traffic, so no courier can reach a unit door; instead we deliver to the 24-hour concierge desks that ring the district along Distillery Lane, Mill Street and Cherry Street. The Distillery District is home turf for a Toronto florist, not an out-of-town stop, so a bouquet ordered before 3 PM, Monday to Saturday, reaches a lobby here the same afternoon.