Flowers for Muscle Shoals, AL

Few towns this size punch above their weight the way the Shoals does — the swampy river bend where FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound cut records that half the world can hum. That history still shapes the flower calendar in small ways: a congratulations arrangement carried to a session on Avalon Avenue, an opening-night bouquet for a show at the Shoals Theatre in nearby Florence. Most days, though, Muscle Shoals orders like the working town it is. Anniversary roses go to the neighborhoods off East Avalon and Woodward, get-well baskets run to Helen Keller Hospital just over the Sheffield line, and sympathy sprays are timed to services at the funeral chapels that serve Colbert County. The Tennessee River and Wilson Dam pin the north edge; the lake roads out that way get a landmark in the notes so nobody hunts for a driveway.

Other Alabama cities.