For over 20 years, Ward Niffenegger has taken care of the flowers at the Kalona Golf Club — planting, weeding, watering, building flower beds and generally keeping the course looking beautiful. With the help of his wife, Kathy, Niffenegger estimates that he puts in about 100-200 hours a year tending to the golf course’s flowers.

Niffenegger lives adjacent to the course and the flowers he’s planted along his property give the green a beautiful pop of color, but he also plants and maintains a large variety of flowers throughout the golf club, from in front of the clubhouse, to around the hole markers to around the bathrooms and other areas.

“It’s satisfying, to see them grow,” Niffenegger said. “A lot of out-of-town people come and that’s one of the first things they comment on, how nice the golf course looks. Not just the flowers, but everything, together.”

Most of the flowers are perennials that Niffenegger donated himself, like day lilies and hostas. But he also plants annuals in front of the club house and hangs baskets of other annuals throughout the course. He has even hooked up many of these hanging baskets to automatic watering systems — thanks to a timer, they’re all watered daily without Niffenegger having to haul water.

“We’ve made a lot of flower beds that were nothing, that had grown up in weeds and were difficult to take care of,” Niffenegger said. “My goal was to make sure that whatever we put in would be things that can almost take care of themselves.”

But there is still a lot of work to be done, including a lot of weeding, Niffenegger said. He’s an early riser and likes to hit the course early to take care of weeding and watering — he’s usually done by 6:30 or 7 a.m., before golfers start showing up.

Before Niffenegger started curating flowers for the golf course, the hole markers stood alone, sometimes surrounded by small patches of grass that were hard to mow. But now, the markers peek out from a bed of day lilies, peonies and hostas. Niffenegger even built a bench near the marker for hole four — a beautiful space to stop and take a rest.

Niffenegger showed me a flower bed he and Kathy built around a golf cart path. They built a short retaining wall, dug out all the clay dirt, replaced it with better dirt and planted the flowers.

“Establishing the beds is where most of the work is,” Niffenegger said. “We’re doing one near hole nine now. It was old, in bad shape and poorly designed, so we’re digging that one completely out and building new retainers to put it back.”

Niffenegger gets help from Kathy and also from superintendent Nick Leach and a few helpers he has hired.

Flowers are impermanent. Every fall, they wither and die, but Niffenegger said he doesn’t see the seasons changing as any kind of death, but instead an opportunity for rebirth.

“With flowers, you enjoy them while you can. I don’t look at it like, ‘Gee, they’re gone in the fall,’ but more as a renewal,” he said. “There are always new flowers. They come back. You can plant more. It’s an opportunity to bring new life into it.”