Flowers for Junction City, KS

A soldier gets word she is coming home from a rotation, and someone across the country wants roses waiting in the quarters before she walks in — that order, in a dozen variations, is the heartbeat of the Junction City flower business. This is the civilian gate town of Fort Riley, home of the 1st Infantry Division, and the calendar here runs on deployments and returns as much as on birthdays and funerals. The town itself sits where the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers meet to form the Kansas, its limestone downtown built from the same rock as the historic fort, with I-70 threading east to Topeka and west to Salina. Deliveries move from downtown out to the housing off Grandview Plaza, up to Milford Lake, and onto the installation itself — the housing areas, unit HQs, and Irwin Army Community Hospital — where a driver who knows the gate rules is worth more than one who does not.

Other Kansas cities.