Buckhead mourns Robert the Flower Man

By Kristi E. Swartz

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Buckhead residents on Friday fondly recalled Robert the Flower Man, the free spirit who became a fixture selling roses from a traffic island at a busy street corner for nearly two decades.

Andrew Riley, an 18-year-old senior at Pace Academy, stopped by corner of Paces Ferry Road and Northside Parkway Friday morning to leave a bouquet of flowers.

"I've been going to Pace Academy for 13 years, and every single day of that time, Robert the Flower Man has been out here," Riley said.

"It just seems natural to pay my respects, even though I never personally knew the guy," he said.

"He's always been an active member in the community and at my school, Riley said. "Whenever there's a dance or something, people don't go to Publix and buy flowers, they come to the Flower Man."

Iris Ferrier said that when she heard the news of Robert Hiestand's death on the radio Friday morning, "it really touched me. I felt really bad about it."

Ferrier said she had driven by the intersection "I guess 10 times a day for maybe 30 years, and he's been here almost as long. Rain, shine, snow, it didn't matter."

"One time, I was driving by and he stopped and went to a car and started loving on a couple of dogs that were in the car and I just stopped and I said, ‘that's the sweetest thing I've ever seen,' and he just laughed and said, ‘Oh, I just love dogs.'"

Hiestand died Tuesday at age 55.

“Sad! I pass him all the time!” said one Twitter post late Wednesday night.

“It’s a sad day for Atlanta,” read another one, part of an original Tweet that announced Hiestand’s death.

If you ask his longtime roommate, Hiestand didn’t plan on making a career out of selling roses in Buckhead.

He just came through Atlanta in the 1980s on his way to California, according to Ed Wallace. Hiestand was headed out that way to look for his dad, but when his motorcycle broke down, he decided to stop and get a job here.

“So, he got a job with this flower thing, and he’s never left it,” said Wallace, who rents rooms out of his Forsyth County home. Hiestand had been staying with him since the late 1990s.

“He’s been on that corner for almost 20 years,” Wallace said.

Wallace said Hiestand always had a story – either about the governor stopping by and buying roses or a limousine pulling up at 3 a.m. and buying the last three or four dozen flowers he had.

“I think every governor since he’s been there has stopped by and gotten flowers from him,” Wallace said.

The AJC interviewed Hiestand in 1994. At that point, he had been selling flowers -- roses and carnations -- for about nine years. His tale of getting to that corner is a little different than his roommate's:

Hiestand, who studied welding in his native South Carolina, was headed to Alabama for a job. When he hit Atlanta, his motorcycle ran out of gas.

Hiestand decided to just stay put. He answered an ad for a part-time job selling flowers on street corners and then went out on his own in 1986.

"I have a job I'm really happy doing," Hiestand told the AJC in 1994. "And I like to think I have a successful business. I can make a living at it, and I've made a lot of friends out here."

Hiestand would sell flowers in the rain, unless there was a major downpour and he didn’t have his large, backyard umbrella to cover them.

And, he’d be out there in the cold, unless the temperatures dropped to the point that they’d harm the roses, Wallace said.

Wallace said he’s waiting on a report from the Forsyth County Medical Examiner’s office on an exact cause of death. But he said Hiestand had a seizure in the living room about six weeks ago.

Wallace said he didn’t want Hiestand to drive – even to the point of saying he couldn’t rent a room anymore if he did. So Hiestand got another roommate – a man named Bradley -- to drive him to the flower warehouse and to the corner each day.

Bradley, in fact, was out there on that Buckhead corner last night trying to sell flowers, Wallace said.

Staff writer Mike Morris and photographer John Spink contributed to this article.