Flowers for Loveland, CO

No town in Colorado wears its name harder than Loveland. Each February the post office cancels a flood of valentines by hand and sends them back out with a verse, and the flower trade downtown moves in the same rhythm — hand-tied reds stacked in the coolers a week early, drivers mapping the neighborhoods around Lake Loveland before the 14th even arrives. The rest of the year it is a working Front Range city of roughly 80,000 on the Big Thompson River: Fourth Street storefronts, the Benson Sculpture Garden with its several hundred bronzes, the Centerra retail district off Interstate 25, and US-34 running west out of town into the Big Thompson Canyon toward Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. Get-well arrangements ride north to the Medical Center of the Rockies at the interchange, birthdays and anniversaries land in the subdivisions off Boyd Lake and Taft, and canyon addresses go on scheduled afternoon runs.

Other Colorado cities.