BOULDER - Even now, with snow blanketing the Pearl Street Mall, Paul Hester can envision next summer when the 15,000 bulbs he planted will bloom into an orgy of pinks, reds and yellows, a cornucopia of color.

For the first summer in 22 years, Hester won't be around to make sure that each flower bed on the four-block pedestrian mall is given loving care, each tree pruned and tested for disease.

After 22 years, the Jamaica-born gardener is calling it quits, retiring today at the age of 56.

"I don't know who he thinks is going to replace him, but no one will be able to," Boulder Cafe owner Dave Jablonski said Thursday. "Paul's made the mall into a Parisian environment, very European. It's completely fabulous."

Jablonski is just one of the dozens of merchants on the Pearl Street Mall who sing Hester's praises, talk about his vision and his small kindnesses, such as making sure entryways are shoveled if the store is open at night.

While flowers are Hester's passion, so is customer service, and lately that's meant shoveling snow - again and again and again.

"My mom planted flowers in our yard" near Montego Bay in Jamaica, he said. "We had ducks and geese for manure. I didn't know at the time how much I was learning" about flowers, colors and gardening.

Hester was a psychology major at Anderson College in Indiana, but never developed a passion for the subject.

"I was stumbling along for a while," he said. And then he visited a friend who had a greenhouse. "This is something that would be a nice career," he thought.

So he got a job in Boulder, tending the gardens at the sewer treatment plant east of the city. A city supervisor noticed the enthusiasm and care he put into his job and assigned him to the Pearl Street Mall a few months later.

"I had a boss, Bob Peck, who kind of let me push hard" on the tiny part of the mall that was all his, Hester said. "He believed in me."

Before long, Hester was in charge of all the flowers.

"There was a moment when I first got hired that I looked at this place as being in need, and I had a vision of people walking by and appreciating the flowers, of every flower bed filled with flowers," he said. "I said, 'If this place can be half as nice as some of the gardens my mother showed me in Jamaica, it would really be something.' "

Instead of 4,000 bulbs, he supervised the planting of 15,000. That's not counting the 25,000 pansies that extend the season from early spring to late fall.

Hester proved that with the right kind of soil preparation, pansies can survive the winter in the Front Range climate. That helped boost sales of pansies at local markets.

He plants begonias and geraniums, coleus for the shade, impatiens and cannas. He cares for the purple mountain ash and the linden, the Austrian pine and the bald cypress.

"Oh, my goodness, he's amazing," Courtney Clark, manager of the souvenir shop, Jackalope, said while Hester advised her of the proper way of knocking snow from her awning. "He's so friendly and helpful. And the flowers are fantastic."

Hester isn't sure what he'll do in retirement. "I've had a few offers," he said. "To tell you the truth, it's really hard to leave; it's hard to think of all these folks who have just been wonderful."

He does know that he'll continue to go to Jamaica three or four times a year with Dr. Richard Cross, of Boulder. The two established the Eye Health Institute, a traveling clinic that does eye exams in Jamaican villages and supplies glasses to poor people. Donations come from people in the Boulder area.

Still, Hester says he'll spend much of his time in Boulder, and, despite what some people think, he's confident that his successor will keep things just as beautiful on the mall.

"When I look up and see someone walking along the mall looking at the flowers, maybe taking a deep breath, and you can see some of the tension of everyday life disappear from them - that's the best moment for me," he said. "That's a real reward."

Paul Hester's annual planting for the Pearl Street Mall

15,000 bulbs

25,000 pansies

scanlon@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-442-8729

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