Photo by Frank McMains
Pruning with Cherry Bombs: And the other unexpected gardening wisdom of Felder Rushing.
Trans-generational plant lore resembles alchemy as much as it does botany. Secrets about when to plant tomatoes or when to take in the mustard greens are as likely to be tied to the liturgical calendar as they are to any notable change in the seasons. My mother has passed me some of her semi-mystical secrets about gardening, and they are always delivered in hushed and deadly earnest tones.
One such piece of wisdom concerned the pruning of roses. It may be violating some witches pact by putting these words on paper, but I (and I am sure many others) was instructed with all the seriousness of catechism that after a rose had bloomed, they needed to be pruned back to a point where the stem had five leaves.
Such information rarely comes with an explanation, much less a discussion of consequences should the young stray from the prescribed course. Avid writer, speaker, radio personality and general character, Felder Rushing, has a different take on things.
Sitting in the exuberantly idiosyncratic yard of his Jackson, Mississippi home, it became clear immediately that he felt that much of gardening “wisdom” could be wholly ignored. Felder began his little backyard lecture in iconoclasm thusly: “You know how they always tell you that you need to trim roses back to five leaves? Well that’s bulls**t, you can trim them with a cherry bomb if you want to.”
Felder Rushing’s discussions of plants and gardening, though he adamantly denies being anti-horticulturalist, are flecked with these sorts of mad-hatter jabs at conventional wisdom. He is about to publish his seventeenth book on gardening, but he will happily tell you that gardening is the same everywhere: “You need to know two thing about gardening—how to dig a hole and that the green end goes up. That’s it.” He also has no love for the publishing industry that leads people to think that they need to buy complex tomes and decipher the processes contained within in order to accomplish simple procedures.
Felder’s commentary, when he is not hosting Mississippi Public Radio’s The Gestalt Gardener, is a little salty, but he has a self-described “court jester” approach to giving people information about plants. According to Felder, most of what he has to say, people already know, but they lack the confidence to try things on their own. His philosophy is one in which gardening is the end in itself, not a process towards a goal. That would be horticulture. For Felder, “Gardening is the journey, not the destination.”
Kindhearted jabs fly out of Felder’s mouth on any subject his nimble and subtle mind settle upon. On the subject of composting, he has a special sense of bewilderment at the pile of books that have been written on a subject that is, in his estimation, the simplest process in the natural world and one which has been occurring for millennia without human intervention of any kind. When he brings it up, Felder says there are only two things you need to know about composting. “Stop throwing s**t away and pile it all in one place.”
Felder’s yard is littered with pink flamingos variously bleached a lighter and lighter shade by the sun. He says that “pink flamingo people” feel a connection to one another, as though they are a flag flown proudly to symbolize membership in some slightly off-kilter club that has no bylaws or rules. This is the sort of club that appeals to Felder—a community of people drawn together solely by their interest in doing things differently, whatever that undertaking may be.
Though he may describe himself as a court jester of the gardening world, something much deeper is going on inside his wispy, grey hair crowned head. The court jester routine is a way of breaking down barriers, shocking people out of their comfort zone and conventional ways of thinking. But, Felder is much too smart to just play the gadfly. He has a special sort of mind that is always probing the world around him and looking for dogmas and practices that don’t make sense.
He has a way of breaking down assumptions and biases with an “aw-shucks” delivery that gets him past the iron gates of the public’s view of the world. He is no motley fool turning cartwheels to amuse his audience; he is a man with a clear-eyed view of the world that constantly presses him to ask why and what for? It is a rare soul that looks around and quickly overturns assumptions and spots nonsense where others see simply the way things have always been done.
Felder professes some disbelief that he is ever asked back to give another speaking engagement, of which he does over a hundred a year. However it is more understandable in context. Among those who dearly love a subject (and gardeners are about as passionate a lot as you will find), a properly delivered rebuttal to the fait accompli of trans-generational wisdom is a welcome break from the solemn doctrine of “how things have always been done.” I cannot say if Felder’s hectic schedule of writing, lecturing, cajoling and proselytizing about a new way to see gardening, and to some extent life as a whole, will have a lasting effect on southern garden clubs or people who plant based on phases of the moon. But, if I ever have children, when it comes time to trim the roses, I will whisper in their ear, “Why don’t you go grab that sack of cherry bombs and let me show you how this is done.”
Photos by Frank McMains.
