Flowers for Wilson, NC

For most of a century Wilson called itself the World's Greatest Tobacco Market, and the brick warehouses that sold those leaves still stand downtown — except now they hold loft apartments, restaurants, and the open-air Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, where the county's giant wind-driven folk sculptures spin over what used to be the market floor. That reinvention is the backdrop for a day of flower deliveries in Wilson. Orders move from the revitalized downtown out to the Barton College campus, the tidy residential blocks off Ward Boulevard and Raleigh Road Parkway, the Forest Hills and Longleaf neighborhoods, and the industrial parks trailing along US-264. Wilson Medical Center, the Duke LifePoint hospital off Ward, keeps a steady flow of get-well and new-baby arrangements moving, and I-95 running the town's edge means eastern-Carolina help is never far when a rush hits.

Other North Carolina cities.