Flowers for Montevideo, MN

Montevideo — everyone here just says Monte — sits at the meeting of two rivers, the Chippewa flowing into the Minnesota, and that confluence has shaped the town since the milling days. It is a Chippewa County seat of about five thousand with an unusually cosmopolitan streak for the western prairie: a formal, decades-old friendship with Montevideo, Uruguay, marked by a statue of the Uruguayan founder Jose Artigas near downtown and a Fiesta Days celebration every summer. For the local florist, though, the day looks like western Minnesota — anniversary roses to the older homes on the bluff above the river bottoms, birthday bouquets carried out Highway 7 and 212, get-well runs to CCM Health on the north side, and sympathy pieces for farm families scattered across a wide sweep of Chippewa and Lac qui Parle county sections. Beyond the town the map opens onto prairie and river-bottom country, with little places like Watson, Milan, and Clarkfield out on the loops.

Other Minnesota cities.