Flowers for Cumming, GA

Forsyth County grew faster than almost anywhere in Georgia over the last two decades, and Cumming absorbed most of it — which is why an ordinary Tuesday's deliveries fan out across three very different maps at once. There is the old town: the courthouse square, the Cumming Fairgrounds, the churches along Canton Highway where a lot of the sympathy work still lands. There is the GA-400 spine, where new-build subdivisions off Peachtree Parkway and McFarland Road stack up faster than the street signs, and where a birthday bouquet might be going to a house that did not exist three years ago. And there is Lake Lanier, whose coves off Buford Dam Road and Sanders Road turn a simple address into a puzzle of gate codes and dock numbers every summer weekend. A designer here plans the afternoon around the 400 crawl near Exit 13 as much as around the flowers.

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