“Assignment: Memphis”: showcasing unique, odd or interesting aspects of Bluff City.
Signs of the season on display
If you are dour or sour and like to glower, this is not your hour.
Because spring has sprung, and with it: flower power.
The cherry trees have blossomed, the dogwoods and azaleas are starting to pop, and the magnolias and irises are on their way.
Yes, Memphis has problems, but its foliage is not among them.
The city in the spring bursts like an exploding box of Crayolas — like a hail storm of Easter eggs — with greens, pinks, reds, purples and other colors.
The verdant, floral bounty is a tonic. It’s enough to make a kid run barefoot, a dog chase a butterfly, and a journalist humiliate himself by leading a story with a shameless and embarrassing burst of rhyme.
“We have long springs,” said Rick Pudwell, 73, director of horticulture at the Memphis Botanic Garden, where plants of all varieties have as much a place of pride as animals do at the Memphis Zoo, which is where Pudwell worked before he came to the botanic garden 26 years ago.
“Some things start blooming in January,” said Pudwell, who moved to Memphis in 1986 from his hometown of Chicago, where the long season is — brrrr — winter. “From February on, through April, there’s something constantly in bloom. That’s a long spring.”
Even outside of spring, Memphis is a wonder, Pudwell said. “Memphis is a very green city,” he said. “We have a lot of trees that hold their leaves in the winter. You’ve got magnolias and hollies and camellias and things that are green all winter long.”
A horticulture student at Michigan State, Pudwell became even more appreciative of plants after he was drafted into the Army, trained as a medic and posted to a field hospital in Thailand near the Cambodia border during the Vietnam War.
Some plants are toxic, some species are “invasive,” and some will even trap and consume an insect. But plants, to state the obvious, don’t fire weapons at their fellow plants. They drop seeds, not bombs. They blaze with color, not napalm.
“That was a rough part of my life,” Pudwell said of his service, which lasted from 1968 to 1970. “I saw a lot of horrible stuff. I wanted to do something more peaceful, and I was always interested in the environment.”
He was impressed by the foliage of Southeast Asia, which didn’t much resemble the shrubs and trees of Chicago.
“There are all kinds of enormous tropical trees, there’s timber bamboo that are like 50 feet tall, there’s palms and hibiscus... We’d go out in the field, in the jungle, and people would say, ‘Rick, be quiet, you’re going to get us shot,’ because I was so impressed with the flora, I’d say, ‘Look at that!’ I’d say it out loud, ‘Look at that!’”
Returning to the U.S., Pudwell worked in greenhouses and nurseries in and near Chicago before moving in Memphis to oversee horticulture at the zoo and, then, at the botanic garden, the 96-acre space in Audubon Park.
Established in 1953, the Memphis Botanic Garden is home to 30 “specialty gardens” devoted to hydrangeas, magnolias, irises, herbs, Asian species and more. There, “flower power” is not a hippy catchphrase but something real.
Open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week, the botanic garden is located at 750 Cherry Road, and the address is no coincidence: The site is notable for the pink-towhite Yoshino cherry trees that line Cherry Road from Southern Avenue to Park Avenue and that have served as one of Memphis’ most reliable harbingers of spring since the 1950s. The same species as the famous cherry trees found in Washington (which were a postwar gift to America from the Japanese government), the trees are in their fullest blossom in March.
Pudwell believes plants should be treated with something of the respect and affection that people more routinely bestow on animals.
“If you think about it, everything we do is affected by plants,” Pudwell said. “We couldn’t exist without them, even though everybody doesn’t always think of them in that way.
“They produce oxygen, they help keep the environment together. We eat plants, or they’re eaten by animals, which we eat, or they’re used in building materials, or in products that we use.”
Plus, they’re “spectacular,” he said. “The dogwoods and the azaleas are the most spectacular, and they’re everywhere.”
Apparently, increasing numbers of people have begun to embrace Pudwell’s point of view. Stuck at home, folks are paying more attention to their yards and gardens than they have in years, Pudwell said. Not traveling much beyond their own neighborhoods, they are stopping to smell the roses, literally. Nurseries and garden centers are booming as well as blooming, with the botanic garden doing record business during its fall plant sale. He said he’s expecting the upcoming April and May sales to be just as successful.
“I always appreciate a plant that’s well grown,” he said. “A plant allowed to do what it’s supposed to do is always awe-inspiring.”