Felder Rushing is a newspaper columnist, radio host for Mississippi Public Radio and retired MSU Extension Horticulturist. He can be contacted at felder@felderrush
ing.net.I have gotten quite a lot of e-mails about daffodils being killed on Mississippi State University’s main campus, including e-mails from students, faculty, graduates and employees afraid to speak publicly because of job security concerns. The relatively minor hubbub would be comical if it weren’t indicative of a deeper issue.
This isn’t about flowers. It’s about a short-term administrator’s inability to control whimsical personal urges and his attempt to “bunker down” when his orders are questioned.
No one is questioning the right of MSU President Robert H. “Doc” Foglesong, a former four-star general, to make aesthetic decisions related to the beautification of his university or his outstanding leadership and contributions to MSU and our state’s citizens.
However, a number of people have rightfully questioned his horticultural judgment, and his underlings are falling on their own swords to cover for him in this silly, unnecessary debacle.
How many football fans would tolerate his calling plays for Coach Croom?
I have personally noted how decades of careful horticultural training and effort were recently wasted when dozens of healthy, statuesque crape myrtles around Polk-Dement Stadium at Dudy Noble Field were lopped back severely (against all good horticultural advice).
Now, even in the face of hundreds of protests, an untimely destruction has commenced, silencing thousands of flowering bulbs that were carefully planted over many years to bring decades of spring color and cheer.
He is claiming that there is merely “a long term process of relocating and redefining where our flower beds are located … that’s why we are saving the bulbs.”
If that is the case, why not wait a few weeks until the flowers have faded and formed next year’s buds? No horticulturist would have recommended otherwise. It is true that as daffodils come and go from fall to spring, they have their ups and downs. But MSU’s beautiful campus – my alma mater, home to nationally-recognized schools of horticulture and landscape architecture – has room for a little naturalistic ebb and flow. And in the short term, other flowers can easily be interplanted with existing daffodils.
The president was off base and combative when he suggested publicly that this writer has “another agenda.” I really don’t care about micromanaging MSU’s flowerbed design. I am simply agreeing with a large number of people that there is a compromise available, that the “lilies of the field” be spared this spring and concerned folks be allowed to relocate the most egregious offenders – a few weeks after they bloom – to a safe harbor.
As a proud veteran whose family has served honorably in American military service since the 1700s, I am aware that few generals without oversight take counsel well, much less admit missteps. So I am not surprised that this one man’s whimsy and intractability is laying waste so much goodwill over something this easy to correct.