Flowers for Hartford, CT

Mark Twain could have lived anywhere on earth, and he picked Farmington Avenue — of all the beautiful towns he had seen, he wrote, Hartford was the chief. The city still rewards that kind of attention. The gold Capitol dome overlooks Bushnell Park and its 1914 carousel; the Wadsworth Atheneum has hung pictures downtown longer than any other public art museum in the country; Elizabeth Park tends America's oldest municipal rose garden out along the western edge. Wrapped around the postcard layer is the working city: Park Street's bodegas and the Parkville Market food hall in Frog Hollow, Franklin Avenue's red-sauce blocks in the South End, Trinity College's brownstone Long Walk above Barry Square, insurance towers emptying into parking garages at five sharp. Flowers thread through every layer daily, and no address in the six street ZIPs is more than about fifteen minutes from the shop that arranged them.

Other Connecticut cities.