Felder Rushing
“Maverick Gardening - Finding and Following Bliss in Troubling Times”
Date & Time: March 16th, Social hour 6:30 PM, Presentation 7:30 PM
Location: St. Dunstan's Church, 4393 Garmon Road NW, Dunwoody
Felder Rushing is a 10th-generation Southern gardener who travels worldwide in his quest for practical and inspirational home-gardening ideas to share. Widely promoting his belief that too many garden-variety gardeners are put off by strict horticultural rules (“We are daunted, not dumb” he says), Felder’s practical, encouraging approach to teaching gardening earned him a celebration by Southern Living Magazine’s as one of “25 people most likely to change the South.”
The retired colors-outside-the-lines Extension Horticulturist, who started the Master Gardener program in his state, continues to write his state-wide syndicated newspaper columns of 44 years and counting, and for 22 years remains the host the weekly live Gestalt Gardener program, one National Public Radio’s most popular gardening programs, broadcast from his travels around the country and world. He is the admin for a 54,000-member Mississippi Gardening Facebook page.
He has written or contributed substantially to 33 gardening books, including national award winners such as Passalong Plants, Slow Gardening, Better Homes and Garden’s children’s gardening book, and Maverick Gardeners. He was HGTV’s original online Q&A person, and his garden exploits and philosophy have been featured three times in the New York Times.
The contributing editor at Fine Gardening, Horticulture, and Garden Design magazines has had his articles and photographs published in dozens of other publications including Organic Gardening, Landscape Architecture, Better Homes and Gardens, and the National Geographic; his garden has been featured in many.
Felder served as a distinctly non-stuffy board member of the American Horticulture Society, is a member of the Royal Horticulture Society, British Cottage Garden Society, British Cactus and Succulent Society, national director of the Garden Writers’ Association, and president of several garden organizations including the Mississippi Native Plant Society and the Jackson Men’s Garden Club, and an honorary member of the Garden Clubs of Mississippi.
For the past 15 years he has spent six months a year traveling, lecturing, and reporting from both his celebrated Mississippi cottage garden and a Victorian terrace herb and succulent garden in Lancashire, England from where he lectures abroad.
