The man is on a mission. He’s tiptoed through cemeteries, back alleys and the wrong side of dozens — make that hundreds, maybe thousands — of towns. He’s racked up a million frequent flyer miles. And, by his account, he’s “spent more time backing up for a second look than going forward.”
What he’s searching for is practically unmentionable in haute horticulture circles. But then there’s nothing haute about him. (This dude actually preaches the finer points of dandelions, pink flamingoes and planters made from old rubber tires.)
The man is on a hunt for that plant that can’t be killed, short of mincing it with your rototiller, and even then it might pop its persistent little head right back up out of the soil.
Call him the King of the Unkillables.
Or, in polite company at least, call him Felder Rushing (after all, that is his name — really, it is).
He believes in no-frills gardening. Gardening by the gut. Never mind the bibliographies and the treatises on the nitrogen-potassium-calcium ratio of the compost heap.
His instructions for growing (grab a pen, you won’t wanna miss this): A. Dig hole. B. Insert plant. “Green side up,” he reminds, lest that’s a point that passed you by.
Pretty much leave things alone after that, according to the Gospel of Felder. At least in the roundup of plants he’s after. (Of the beauties he finds thriving beside crumbling headstones in long forgotten graveyards, he says: “These are plants that dead people can grow.”)
Even watering in the world of Felder Rushing is no more than an afterthought. If you happen to stumble over a hose.
Horticulture versus gardening
“This is not horticulture. This is gardening. Gardening is not by the book. Horticulture is all by the book.
“Have you ever fried Spam,” he asks, as if this might clarify the point. “It curls up. Anybody who ever fried Spam knows, instinctively, you gotta cut the edge to keep it from curling. You don’t read that in a book, you just know it. Well, this is the cooking-Spam approach to gardening.
“My message is, `The rules stink.'”
A 10th-generation Southern gardener (Jackson, Miss., is the town he calls home), with some high-falutin’ horticulture degrees to boot, he shucked all the fancy stuff and prides himself on what he calls his “cheesy” proclivities. You know, like stacking old used tires to make a year-round Christmas tree that sits in the middle of his oh-so-cluttered cottage garden. Or proudly showing off the pink flamingo signed with a Sharpie pen by Donald Featherstone, the Massachusetts art school graduate who back in 1957 patented the very first plastic flamingo.
And now, now that he’s retired after nearly 25 years as a university Extension Consumer Horticulturist and Master Gardener trainer and coordinator (he still has a syndicated twice-weekly garden column and a live call-in radio show, and he’s a contributing editor for Horticulture and Garden Design magazines), the 51-year-old Rushing has taken to touting the toughies (that is, tough plants that can’t be trounced).
His first toughie tome focused on the South, and now this lifelong Mississippi boy has taken on the North in a book titled, “Tough Plants for Northern Gardens: Low Care, No Care, Tried and True Winners” (Cool Springs Press, 240 pages, $24.99).
And what in tarnation does a Dixie boy know about the Land of Ice and Snow, and what grows here?
“That’s a good question,” Rushing said recently as he rolled across Oklahoma in the front seat of a pickup truck, yacking on a cell phone. “A Waffle House is a Waffle House no matter where you are. Gardening is gardening. I’m not talking about Northern gardening. I’m talking about tough plants for the North, and that’s a huge, huge distinction.”
To bone up on the subject, Rushing, who is revered by many on the garden-writers circuit for his irreverence and his down-home ways, hopped behind the wheel and cruised backroads from “west of Des Moines to Long Island and Bar Harbor, Maine, across southern Canada and into Alaska, always searching for forgotten plants surviving [even thriving] in utter neglect.”
Then, whenever he ran into garden writers at conventions, he passed around his list, and whittled it down, checking it twice and then thrice to make sure nary a finicky fleur snuck into the bunch.
And while some of the entries might sound prosaic (the almighty dandelion is on the list), the point is this: They will not disappoint, and in just the right combinations, asserts Mr. Unkillable Himself, they can be downright smashing, even head-turning in a haute horticulture way.
Under “Annuals That Endure,” Rushing lists these, to name just a few Bs: basil, begonia, black-eyed Susan. Even Queen Anne’s lace makes the grade.
Goldenrod defender
Under the heading, “Perennials That Prevail,” he regales the virtues of not only asters, bee balm and bleeding heart (for starters) but also goldenrod, which he protests has been blamed wrongly for allergies and, he claims, is widely appreciated in European gardens.
He even outlines houseplants that won’t shrivel up like prehistoric fossils, given a healthy dose of inattention, er, flat-out neglect.
And he won’t be stopped.
“Somebody’s gotta take the eyes of a gardener and the training of a horticulturist and get into the small towns and the backroads and the cemeteries. Horticulturists can’t see the common plant, they can’t see the trees for the forest.
“You gotta see this stuff growing. Nobody’s doing anything, and these plants just grow and grow.”
And with no luck at all, the same is bound to happen at your house.
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Felder Rushing will make two appearances at this year’s Chicago Flower & Garden Show at Navy Pier. At 12:30 p.m. March 20, he will be talk about “Hardy Plants for Midwest Gardens” and at 3:30 p.m., he’ll tackle the topic “An Irreverent Southern Gardener Looks Northward.”
He also will appear in two special programs presented by the School of the Chicago Botanic Garden on March 18 and 19. He will lecture on garden myths from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. March 18; cost is $37. He will lecture on “Tough Plants for Midwestern Gardens” from 10 a.m. to noon March 19; cost, $30. To register or for more information, call 847-835-8261 or see www.chicagobotanic.org/school.
You can find more about Rushing’s irreverent ways at his Web site www.felderrushing.com, where you can write to him and he’ll write back. He promises.
