People and Plants: The Secret Behind Keeping SEC College Campuses Beautiful

Justin Sutton ’05 grew up surrounded by cotton and waving at the sky. Hailing from a small town outside of Huntsville called Harvest, Ala., Sutton’s house was bounded by cotton fields tended by a farmer named Gary, who let Justin and his brothers ride in the tractor. Come growing season, they’d wave at the crop duster that flew at almost roof level over their house.

Wanting to join in, a young Sutton even hooked up a yard rake to his bicycle and pretended to plow the popping white fields.

“I remember riding down the cotton rows, thinking I was actually doing something,” Sutton said. “Then you’d get real tired because you realize it’s dragging pretty good…I think my love of agriculture was birthed out of those experiences.”

In 2005, Sutton turned his love of farming into a landscape horticulture degree from Auburn, and he is now director of landscape services in charge of keeping the loveliest village on the Plains, well, incredibly lovely.

For a kid from Harvest, it probably seemed like destiny.

Like Sutton, Kim Byram ’94 grew up in a small town, Nauvoo, outside of Jasper, Ala. Like Sutton, he liked to fish and run outside. But he didn’t like taking care of the large family garden. Thinking he was going to be an architect, Byram transferred from Walker College (now Bevill State Community College) to Auburn in 1991 but realized architecture wasn’t for him. A friend suggested he go to Ag Hill and see Dr. Harry Ponder, and his future course was set on landscape horticulture.

Not bad for a guy who describes his job with a laugh as “playing in the dirt.” “There’s obviously a lot more to it than that. It’s like I’m still just a kid,” Byram said. “I’m probably the only guy who hand-raked his own basketball court. I even dug a little trench for the 3-point line because I love playing in the dirt.” Today he oversees almost 1,400 acres, 100 employees and one elephant topiary as the director of campus grounds at the University of Alabama.

Jeff McManus ’88 grew up riding a tractor but not sure where he was going. Both his parents were Auburn graduates and educators. From the time he was 8, his dad (an ag grad) had him riding a tractor in their fields around Douglasville, Ga. While he agreed to follow his parents to Auburn University, he was certain he was not going into agriculture. He told anyone that would listen he was going to major in computers. It was the ’80s and that was a thing. Hated it. He became a marketing major. Hated it. Then he tried landscape horticulture and realized, his dad wasn’t so wrong after all.

“I just changed majors one last time. At that point, I knew this was my passion,” McManus said. “And I realized that they have other jobs in horticulture besides riding on the back of a tractor.” McManus has been director of landscape and waste services at Ole Miss since 2000, where, like Sutton and Byram, his team’s work has earned local and national awards.

 Across the country, Auburn graduates are overseeing some of the most pristine properties, from theme parks to resort hotels and sprawling Fortune 500 company headquarters. But nowhere is their impact greater than on college campuses, where Auburn graduates are responsible for many of the country’s most beautiful academic environments. And they manage hundreds of employees to make sure every blade of grass is green, every piece of trash is picked up and every flower is blooming.

Taking Care of the Front Door

You think your office is big? Try comparing it to the vast workspaces of any director of campus grounds. Auburn’s campus is more than 700 acres, dotted with 342 buildings and more than 11,000 trees. Ole Miss has more than 5,000 trees spread on 1,200 acres of campus as well as a golf course, airport and even a former mall.

So how do you take care of huge campuses with dozens of buildings and hundreds of acres of open spaces? You prioritize.

All three men regularly meet with upper administration to determine where upcoming notable events or initiatives will take place. They pore over event calendars and direct their staff to make sure high-traffic areas are free of trash and properly maintained. It could be the location of an upcoming board of trustees meeting or an admissions event that directs the efforts and attention of their workers.

“There’s also some areas that are kind of what you call microclimates,” Sutton explained. “They’re their own little climate zone, really, within our campus and so they must be treated differently. You have very visible areas like Samford Park, where really, the campus and the community and the city meet.”

These “front doors” to campus are the signature places at the universities that are always busy and help establish that great first impression. For Auburn, that’s Samford Lawn and for Alabama it’s a place like The Quad or Manderson Landing.

At Ole Miss, McManus has developed a priority grid of areas (with 1-5 ranking) on campus. The highest priority areas like the Lyceum and the Grove get touched weekly, while other, less-visible spots might get worked on every few weeks.

Byram even has a topiary elephant he often places in front of the administration office, a high-traffic location on campus. “It’s a moveable garden,” Byram said.

The Flower Effect

All three graduates know the stats and the importance of the work they do. They don’t just plant flowers, they recruit students.

In 2005 a study revealed that 62% of college students based their college decision on the appearance of the buildings and the landscape. That same study showed that most students make their enrollment decision in the first 10 minutes. That’s way before most prospective students have had time to see a classroom or speak to a faculty member.

“We can’t cover anything up, so if it looks bad, it’s on full display for everybody,” Sutton said. “Admissions, and just overall what people think of Auburn. I believe we play a huge part in that.”

McManus often brings in coaches to speak to his team and talk about the influence that the campus has on landing student-athletes.

“You know, they feel like they’re part of something bigger,” McManus said. “So many of our staff really enjoy the athletics at any campus, whether Auburn or Ole Miss or Alabama, they’re into it. When they feel like they’re a part of that, it really is motivating.”

Byram often hears stories of students who decide to enroll at Alabama based on his team’s work. “The kids see our work,” Byram said. “And mom and dad see a clean environment. It makes a difference.”

Amy Ware is Auburn’s associate director for transfer admissions and recruitment programming who oversees organizing campus tours for more than 28,000 prospective students and guests each year.

She says they frequently get comments on how beautiful and welcoming the campus looks, which is hugely influential in a potential student’s decision.

“You have to be able to see yourself there,” Ware said. “You can look online, and you can look at all the statistics and courses that are offered. But Auburn’s beautiful campus makes a student feel like this is the right place for them.”

In fact, every other year they do a walk-through of the student tour with facilities to make sure all the high-visibility places are looking their best.

“Students don’t spend all of their time inside the classroom,” Ware said. “They spend a lot of it on campus outside the classroom, so I think they take all that into account when they’re looking at a campus.”

People and Plants

The work is hard. The hours can be long. And the results are always on display for public scrutiny. Which is why if you ask any of these three men about their success, they immediately talk about their teams and how important they are. A lesson they learned quickly in school at Auburn under the direction of Professor Harry Ponder ‘70 is summarized by one short phrase, “people and plants.” While they started out in the field doing the work they now oversee, each of them is now in a more supervisory role, responsible for large teams of dozens of maintenance and landscape experts and overseeing significant budgets that make it all work.

“The relationships we have with our employees are the most important part of what you do. Everything else follows that,” Sutton said, whose department has almost 60 employees.

Byram talks at length about treating everyone on his team of approximately 100 employees the same, no matter what their role or where they land on the org chart.

Inspired by the Auburn Creed—and the creed of the Green Berets—McManus collaborated with his employees to develop their own creed, which is now part of their professional development program called Landscape University.

“You got to have good people, and that falls back on the leader a lot,” McManus said. “Then you’ve got to have an administration that supports you. And you have to have a vision.”

After a morning spent in meetings, all of them like to drive around campus, seeing the projects underway and talking to the workers, ensuring they have everything they need. “Our team is so important. A project may have been your idea, but a group of people dug it up, planted it and made it happen,” Byram said.

And with safety such a high priority on campuses with thousands of 19-21-year-olds, training is an expectation and not a luxury.

“Part of our curriculum here is to learn about your trade. Learn plants, learn weeds, learn flowers, learn trees, learn diseases and pests and fungi that affect these plants so you can do a better job of maintaining campus,” Sutton said. “If you come work for us, we’ll pay you and we’ll educate you too.”

The Trouble with Tailgating

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. No, not that one. Tailgating. While everyone’s favorite pastime is a fantastic way to spend a Saturday in the South, it puts a huge strain on the landscape and maintenance departments. With thousands of visitors swarming onto campus eight or nine times in the fall, flowers are bound to get trampled and the litter quickly piles up. The minute a game ends is when the maintenance teams get to work.

“We get on campus around 6 a.m. on Sunday to pick up a lot of the loose litter and stuff with our waste management team,” Sutton said. “Our department motto is that every day we want to be able to say that campus has never looked better.”

Ole Miss uses an army of workers and student volunteers to clear 80 to 100 tons of trash from the campus after each home game. In fact, one of the things McManus looks most forward to when he retires one day is “going to bed at a normal hour after a home football game.”

But the ultimate compliment? That came from none other than the late Auburn Football Coach Pat Dye. Sutton said that Dye once told him, “I come through campus about every Sunday afternoon, and I can’t even tell there’s been a football game.”

Rolling the Oaks

While all three schools must deal with the challenges of SEC tailgating, the tradition of rolling Toomer’s Oaks is uniquely Auburn.

Auburn arborist Alex Hedgepath oversees the cleanup after each Toomer’s rolling. An outside contractor often uses large sticks, bamboo rods and water to remove the toilet paper. They donate any full rolls. But getting up every white speck after a huge Auburn win is impossible.

“This tradition is 100% Auburn,” Sutton said. “We’ve had it to where we’ve had a women’s basketball victory. It got rolled. We cleaned it up. And the next day the men won and then it was rolled, and we cleaned it up again. So we try to be a little bit more strategic about it if we have back-to-back events.”

Can’t See the Flowers for the Weeds

Maybe it’s the constant striving for perfection. Or the daily difficulty of trying to keep hundreds of acres perfect while more than 30,000 people are walking on it. Your work is never done when you are a director of landscape services. Every project, every plant, every square inch that you oversee is constantly growing, dying or changing according to the dictates of the season and the care provided. But for these Auburn graduates and the people they oversee, the pursuit is part of the fun.

It’s hard for me because I’m a perfectionist,” Sutton said. “I don’t see the nice, pretty flowers. I see the weed growing in the corner of that flower bed. I know other people see that too. That’s what my mind’s drawn to because that pretty flower bed is what’s expected in my mind. That’s our standard. That’s where we start.”

By Todd Deery ’90