Flowers for Ajo, AZ

Ajo was built to a plan almost nobody expects to find in the middle of the Sonoran Desert: a landscaped Spanish-Colonial plaza with a train-depot arcade and two mission-style churches, laid out by the copper company a century ago and still the heart of a town of a few thousand. When Phelps Dodge closed the open-pit mine, Ajo reinvented itself around the desert road — Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Lukeville border crossing to the south, an artist colony filling the old Curley School, and a slow drift of winter snowbirds and Border Patrol families keeping the plaza cafes open. Flowers here follow that mix: a bouquet to a plaza gallery opening, a get-well basket over to Desert Senita health center, an anniversary arrangement carried up to a house on the old townsite hill where the mine managers once lived.

Other Arizona cities.