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PAUL:

On Saturday, October 5th and Sunday, October 6th, Fondren's gardens and bottle trees are on display. A unique way to experience the funky and creative Jackson neighborhood.

Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. On today's show, the “Garden Mama” Nellie Neal leans into community and gardening with a conversation that has me thinking about how everything we do seems to happen in this connected sort of circle, including the way Nellie got circled in to being a part of the garden tour.

NELLIE:

You know Becky Potts?

PAUL:

I do.

NELLIE:

If Becky Potts calls me and says jump off the bridge, I just ask which bridge, okay? It doesn't matter, I'm doing it. And she said, I need you to be in this garden tour. And I said, sure. Becky Potts was the person who did the most for my daughter of anybody in this neighborhood. She organized a Girl Scout troop when they were about—they were brownies—I guess they were seven or eight. We had in this neighborhood public school kids, private school kids, and homeschooled kids. And those kids will never meet if somebody doesn't pull them all together. And Becky pulled them all together. She taught them a lot… gave them a lot, and she literally could tell me to stand on my head and I would try hard to figure out how to do it.

PAUL:

She roped you into being a part of the garden tour.

NELLIE:

Yeah. She, I think that she and Felder began it because of the tour that's in Memphis that they all enjoy going to so much.

PAUL:

And Felder, we're of course talking about Felder rushing MPB's Gestalt Gardener. He said Fondren has the highest concentration of bottle trees in the world. Can we verify this?

NELLIE:

I would trust him. There's one in my front yard because they made me put it there, okay.

PAUL:

That's funny.

NELLIE:

Yeah. Fondren and its legacies.

PAUL:

Well, no one's officially counting. We'll just celebrate the fact that this neighborhood is full of beautiful gardens and beautiful bottle trees. And that fact is being celebrated through this garden tour. the first weekend of October, your garden is on this tour. What will we see at your house?

NELLIE:

My garden is an old horticulturist's plant collection. I have some plants that are intentional. I have some plants that are not. I have some plants… I have a full-size, tall as my house magnolia tree that came up as a seedling when my neighbor cut his trees down and another friend of mine was going to dig that tree up and take it to his place 20 years ago. It's still there. So I have some plants that are things I've grown intentionally, but others that are not.

I'm particularly interested in the things that other people try not to grow. I'm a special person in defense of weeds, quote unquote, because to me, the definition is that a weed is any plant growing out of place to the gardener. The lonely little petunia in the onion patch, for example, you know, the petunia is beautiful, but it's in an onion patch. It's not going to make it there. A lot of people come to me because they want to know how to kill something. And if I can't persuade you to live with it, I can at least tell you what you're doing that's causing that particular pernicious little ground cover to grow instead of your lawn. But I am sustainable and committed to that. So I'm much more likely to help you learn how to live with what's there than perhaps other people would be.

PAUL:

You've been kind of moving around the neighborhood and checking out these other gardens that are going to be on the tour? Because there's like 20 of them, right?

NELLIE:

Yeah, there's some gorgeous gardens. I'm lucky I'm going to be having some folks on my radio show, the Garden Mama show on Saturday mornings on Super Talk. I'll be able to show some of the photos because we we have Super Talk dot TV. So I get to put those up there. So I'm getting to see them this way. I'm kind of famous for peeking over the fence just to see what's going on. I have the Julia child thing, you know, every time she went in the kitchen, she said she learned something. And I do that. Everybody's garden shows me something I didn't already know or reinforces something in some cases, "yeah, that was a good idea. I'm glad I did that." You know, hanging Mardi Gras beads, for example. Different places in our neighborhood will do that. And since I have a closet full, I'm always happy to join that trend.

PAUL:

Sounds like you're always a constant learner and Fondren in Jackson itself can kind of be a classroom for experimentation and finding the things that work. You know, I've talked to people who aren't from here who say, you know, where I came from, it was already being done. And I had this cool idea, but 10 other people already had it too, but I can come to Jackson and I can make something of it and people appreciate it. Do you find that to be true of Fondren and of Jackson as a whole?

NELLIE:

Yes, we're a proving ground. Many people, people that I know from, you know, places that are bigger and perhaps more entrenched in their ways than we are even, will say, well, if you can make it Jackson, you can make it anywhere. If you can find a way to make things make sense in an urban area in the South that is very concentrated compared to the areas around it. I used to live in Oakland, California. The three point some odd million people that are in the state of Mississippi were in my backyard. So yeah, somebody else is probably going to have already had that idea and you just kind of have to polish it. But when you get to somewhere like Mississippi, particularly in Jackson, certainly you have the opportunity because there's somebody interested in it, but they also may not have had either the tools or the time to do what it is you're going to do. So we've seen some pretty innovative stuff here, I think, okay.

PAUL:

I'll put you on the spot and ask you, what are some of your favorite projects or things that you've seen happen here in Jackson?

NELLIE:

The way we deal with water is probably the number one. People that are gathering it and reusing it. I mean, I have a tub under my air conditioner because my water bill was so high for my garden, and I have a separate yard meter and it was still too high for me to water my garden. So we do capture water here. And I've seen other places in the city where people are not only watering, but also filtering and then pumping out and doing things. I think that because we have so much water here, we can demonstrate, we've taken it so for granted, we haven't really felt like we needed to do something. But we also can make faster compost than anybody else. We have the conditions that are absolutely perfect about eight months out of the year for making compost. You can't demonstrate those things in Minnesota.

But here we have those kinds of opportunities. also have, because of the changing nature of our climate zones, average temperatures are increasing five degrees over that 10 year period. And that's when they put out the new maps of the growing zones. So as our growing zones move a little bit further north, we also have the opportunity here to test plants that are going to have to grow all the way to the East Coast. Despite how it feels sometimes, it is cheaper to live here. And there is something about going to a doctor's appointment and realizing that it's the same doctor that you met when he was a resident 10 years before, because people kind of stay here in many cases. We also have the added effect that we have so much that comes into us. I got here because of the intersection of Interstate 55 and Interstate 20. That's where the distribution of horticulture was taking place at that time, horticultural supplies.

PAUL:

Wow.

NELLIE:

And a lot of people get here because of that. Jackson's a lot like my hometown in North Louisiana of Monroe. If you were out in the other hinterlands, they are just like, if you're in the hinterlands around here, you want to go see what a city looks like, this is where you're going to come first. You're probably not going to get on the train and go to Memphis yet, but you'll come to Jackson and see what the city life looks like. Sometimes it looks great. Sometimes it makes you want to do something and fix something and make something of something. We do that, too.

PAUL:

What's just some, some quick advice you would give to someone who wants to start a container above-ground garden, or, you know, if they dare in the Yazoo clay, an in-ground garden here in Jackson.

NELLIE:

If you're going to do a raised bed garden—an in-ground garden’s just about got to be a raised bed garden. No more than about four inches off the top, you know, above ground, but container gardening to me is almost entirely preferable. I have both here, but I take better care of the containers and it's a matter of realizing that you don't… Everything we do is adapted to our situation. So you do things differently in a little bitty pot than you do in a great big planter. But it's still a matter of the way you control the soil mix, the way you make the roots environment, and the way you take care of the plant going forward with water and fertilizer. The good news is —if I had one tip about it—I would say don't put it in the fullest sun that you have. If you have full sun from morning till night, don't put your container garden. It seems like a good idea right up until you have to water three times a day in August.

PAUL:

This is true.

NELLIE:

If you don't do anything else, you should plant parsley in the fall. When you plant your pansies and your daffodil bulbs, people try to grow things in the summer here that really don't like the summer. And parsley is probably the biggest one.

PAUL:

I have to roll back to where we started. You spoke to community at the very beginning and talked about your friend, Becky Potts, who also is part of this garden tour. There's something that keeps people here and the answer is always “the people.” So how do you feel about the community here in Jackson and, and what it helps us to bring to our state and to the world in general?

NELLIE:

You know, the biggest deal about finding your space, any place for a human being to find their place, is that there has to be something that's familiar enough, and yet something that keeps your curiosity peaked. And as a person gets into, believe it or not, the 70-something or others, a lot of people aren't around anymore. And so the willingness of Jacksonians for the most part in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties to still talk to us folks, you know, there are a lot of places in this country where people that are over 65 are basically segregated the way you would do toddlers. And we do have certainly those situations where people who prefer to flock together. We have

plenty of beautiful assisted livings and small apartment kind of things and all that. But it also means that when we get to meet people, we're not necessarily going to meet people that are all the same as us. When I first got here, someone said to me—this was 25 years ago—Fondren was kind of not quite as well thought of as it is today. And someone, a friend of mine from the other side of the freeway over there said, “Well. What are you going to do over there?” And I said, “Well, I don't know. get up in the morning and everybody's getting up, going to work. You know, I guess I'm just going to get up and go to work, even though my office is in my house. That's what I'm still going to do.” And it is that kind of place. You can literally have somebody that's like me that writes and does stuff out of their house right next to somebody who's gone working offshore. We have people that are 95 and we have people that are 22 on my street within a block of me. It's a good place to live because of that. You don't have to ever feel like you are in a box. There's a lot of boxes here; you can jump in any one you want.

That's Garden Mama Nellie Neal, whose call in radio show can be heard every Saturday on Super Talk Mississippi. Shameless plug here, my garden, or should I say my wife's garden, will be a part of the October 5th Fondren Garden and Bottle Tree Tour. Look for more details on our guest Nellie Neal and the garden tour in our show notes at visitjackson.com/soulsessions. Our podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. You can learn more about the great work we're doing to help Jackson, Mississippi shine at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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