Garden follies

By Felder Rushing

This is the week where I usually do my annual Felder Fesses Up, in which I chronicle my previous year’s garden follies and foibles. But it wasn’t so bad after all.

Mostly, in my attempt to reduce garden chores to accommodate my aging old bones, I dug up scattered flower beds and planters, leaving just a handful I can easily manage and still get a good “color echo” vibe. I rogued out a bunch of nandina, pulled piles of Virginia creeper and Asiatic jasmine, and spread a lot of mulch.

I did kill a few plants through neglect, mostly potted plants that were either missed in the last-minute rush to drag stuff indoors before the first frost of Autumn, or from not having someone go by and water while I was overseas for three months. One hundred percent my bad. I have since then lightened my load by giving away all my duplicate potted plants.

Now I mostly try to stick with only the most tried-and-true annuals and minimize their planting in the first place. Because of my consolidated beds, if any fail I am not out much time, effort, or expense. And the holes are still there to stuff in more stuff as needed.

But once again I failed to get finicky lavender, a dry Mediterranean native, to live past mid-summer; luckily for me I travel enough to be able to appreciate them and other here-borderline beauties in their natural settings, so I can stop trying to coddle cool-climate or hot-tropical natives in our fickle corner of the world. There are simply too many great locally adapted plants, each with interesting modern varieties, that love our intermittent heavy rains that interrupt prolonged droughts, plus nonstop all-night heat and humidity so thick you can lick it.

I cleaned most of the summer stuff from a partly sunny raised bed topped with colorful hand-painted pots that host my collection of antique bulbs and a few complementary annuals, to make room for my dozen-plus different super-hardy garden mums; now I will have winter and spring foliage and color from the daffodils, followed by summer and fall foliage and flowers from the mums, all in the same spot and tolerating the same conditions.

Unlike seasonally popular cushion mums and leggy cut flower florist mums, antique garden mums (Crysanthemum rubellum) really thrive here with little care. You may be familiar with the commonly-grown pink passalong cultivar named Clara Curtis, sometimes called country girls, but there is a couple dozen others that do equally well here, and fill an important mid-Autumn niche when little else is really exciting. They all get leggy and floppy, but I just cut them back a bit in late summer to make them bushier with more flowers and less sprawl.

I have collected these mums, which range from deep pink to red, rusty orange, yellow, gold, and white to frilly bicolor, from Oklahoma and Texas to the Carolinas, and they are simply stunning with practically no care whatsoever. Sadly, because they don’t look great in pots on benches, they are largely unavailable in garden centers; however, I have started sharing cuttings and divisions with growers who can get them into popularity through landscapers, whose displays often drive the desire market. We’ll see.

I reworked a couple of decks, added some night lighting, collected a few more forgiving cacti and succulents, learned new maintenance-reducing garden tricks, and spent time helping both my daughter and granddaughter in their little flower and herb gardens, which helps ease my jonesing for gardening at home.

All in all, 2025 wasn’t so bad. Still, better next year, eh?

Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.