By Felder Rushing

Gardening Columnist

Who welcomes, amuses, and inspires you and visitors to your garden, and looks over it while you are not around?

Most folks have garden-planting juices gushing in this month’s over-alluring balmy weather and garden centers brimming with flowers, veggies, and herbs. Forget that on average, up until the end of March and sometimes into April we are likely to wake up to freezing weather, with cold soils and rains liable to rot roots and tender stems before you can say “frost blanket.” So, I am holding off.

But even this cynical old plantsman is looking wistfully at Granny’s concrete chicken perched atop a concrete plinth, all but begging me to get out and start shoving stuff in the ground. Luckily, I already have plenty growing in my raised beds and big containers, including English peas, parsley, potatoes (including in buckets), violas, colorful kales and lettuces, and antique daffodils. Not tempted to set out warmth-loving tomato and pepper, and basil plants just yet, or sow seeds of zinnias. Plenty of time for that later.

But Granny’s chicken still beckons, staring down at assorted gnomes peeking at my solemn saint statue, which the other day had a red cardinal bird perched on his head. They, along with various large stones, birdbaths, bowling balls, heirloom urns, gnarly driftwood, and glass bottle trees punctuate the garden with interesting, colorful shapes around which the seasons swirl.

My favs accessories are the human figures which stand, regardless of weather, as inanimate but alluring garden personalities. For as long as people have accessorized gardens, superstitious folks have erected ersatz crop protectors and more practical modern scarecrows as fearful-looking symbols of hoping for good crops free of pests.

Though not superstitious in the least, I still tuck whimsical figures here and there, placed so only one can be seen at a time lest I come across as someone who over-accessorizes (not that there’s anything wrong with it; even Louis XIV had early four hundred god and goddess statues at Versailles). I do this partly for the same reasons some folks wear earrings and jewelry, my garden version of accessorizing.

My cottage garden sports concrete or ceramic gnomes, most of them hand-painted antiques rescued from estate sales near my other garden in the north of England and smuggled through customs to be rehomed in Mississippi. Rosy-cheeked and pointy hatted, the little guys are cheery companions peeking at one another through the liriope and nandinas.

But my most cherished, besides Granny’s chicken, is a St. Fiacre statue. Not St. Francis, the patron saint of animals and the environment, often represented as a robed figure with a bird on his hand; Fiacre, usually portrayed with a spade in one hand and a sheaf of herbs and vegetables in the other, is the actual patron saint of gardeners.

I’m not Catholic, but I still treason both Fiacre and St. Rose of Lima, patron saint of flower growers holding a flower bouquet, in my garden, for the same reason I love Granny’s chicken, as a memory-jolt to the days when I used to help my old grandmother tending the zinnias surrounding it.

And the thigh-high statue framed by flowers in a curve in the flagstone walk is not only a historic garden accent, but also a reminder of what the reclusive monk was noted for: Sharing vegetables and herbs with visitors and those who passed his humble hermitage.

Horticulturally speaking, my garden does not need these figures. But I am amused, comforted, even inspired, as each oversees its portion of the continually unfolding scenes in my garden. Helps me hold off on spring planting.

 

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