“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.”
Read the full article in this month’s issue of Country Roads Magazine or online here.
