Flowers for Leicester, MA

Newcomers stumble on the name — it is "LES-ter" — and on the geography, because Leicester is less a single village than a cluster of them draped across the hills west of Worcester. The white-steepled common at Washburn Square sits up top; Cherry Valley slides down toward the Worcester line to the east, and Rochdale reaches south into old mill country, each with its own post-office ZIP. Flower orders track the seasons of a small New England town: graduation and Memorial Day in late spring, homecoming and harvest weddings in the fall, and a steady year-round trickle of get-well arrangements heading ten minutes east on Route 9 to the UMass Memorial hospitals in Worcester, where central Massachusetts does most of its healing. Farms out toward Spencer and Route 56 mean some deliveries end at a mailbox on a dirt turn rather than a numbered door.

Other Massachusetts cities.