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 Colorful flowers throughout downtown Auburn provide a stunning backdrop for the classic cars that return to the city each Labor Day weekend. The man who grows and tends those flowers will ride as a parade marshal in the annual Parade of Classics on Saturday, Aug. 30, at 1 p.m. during the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival Clint Stephens has served as the maintenance manager of the DeKalb County Courthouse in downtown Auburn for 39 years.
About 20 years ago, he started planting flowers in triangular plots at the corners of the courthouse square. Stephens admired hanging flower baskets on lamp posts in another city and tried that approach in Auburn. Soon, city officials asked him to extend the baskets to lamp posts beyond the courthouse grounds. Today, his project has grown to a display involving thousands of flowering plants, including 88 hanging baskets and dozens of planters.
Compliments for the downtown flowers have grown most noticeably in the last three years, Stephens said. A dramatic improvement came when he and his wife, Jeanne, began growing their own flowers from starts. “We’ve learned so much more when we started raising them ourselves.
This broker that we started dealing with really taught us,” Stephens said. Petunias account for about 60 percent of the downtown flowers. Other varieties include begonias, Intensia phlox, black pearl pepper plants, decorative grasses and sweet potato vines. “We work on them every day. If you worked on yours at home every day, they probably would look this good,” Stephens said of his plants.
Tending the flowers adds hundreds of hours each year to his task as maintenance manager. His wife and assistant Larry Lane help tend the blossoms. “If people didn’t appreciate them, it wouldn’t be worth it,” Stephens said. “It makes it worthwhile, how much they enjoy them.”
He added, “It costs a little bit of money for the county to do this, but it’s money well-spent.”
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