A Chicken Foot Tale

You never grown chicken foot flower? They're real country, white trash, or cracker but this is their season.

(Note: This essay intertupts the serialized story of writing a garden book that some of you all have read. That series is called Process. It will continue soon.

Y’all may wonder about the small black and white graphic/photo header for Process. This essay, a colorful yarn, tells the story of that photo.)

Way down the red dirt road, past the house that sells goats,  where your cell phone doesn’t work, we use a lot of things other people forgot about. Rotary phones. Clotheslines. Dial-up. Out here, florist flowers are for funerals only.

That’s not to say that we don’t love cut flowers. Even though I never cared for the Sunday morning part of it, helping Momma cut things from the yard and get flowers onto the altar at her church is a memory I cherish. Her church closed during Covid. She misses it, and it makes me sad that she has to miss it too.

The point is a bouquet of yard flowers, even a messy one, even if it’s mostly leaves, sure does convey its own special beauty of thoughtfulness.

Bouquets of fragrant country flowers bring memories and tie us to the old ways—Black-eyed Susan and blue hydrangea, cat whiskers, and cast iron plant. Old heirloom roses too, the kind that doen’t stand up good in a vase but smell like Rose Milk lotion commercials from the Lawrence Welk Show. Simpler times, sweet memories, fragrant connections come with a few flowers picked at the last minute.

Beyond our dirt road, there are people further on out in the country, on the edge of the swamp, who still grow really, really, really country flowers. One lady, a friend of my Momma, named Urbana, uses old colanders she finds at the dump to make hanging baskets for succulents like hen and chicks. She loves the flowers she calls cartwheel lily, hot water flowers,  jewels of Opar, and dog fennel. What the hell is Opar?

But the most obscure, most country bumpkin flower name I ever heard has to be from way down Gum Swamp Road. Chicken feet flowers.  Put the ugly raw image out of your head. Imagine the girls with their toenails painted bright pink, fluffy feathers, tarted-up-for a Sa’dny-night show. Imagine those chicken feet. Those are some sexy chicken feet

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I”m telling you, not even in a high-toned flower shop in AT-Lan-Taa, uptown, will you find a more elegant architectural stem. It’s time for chicken feet flowers to come out.

In early June, they're yellow or kind of orange. By the Forth of July, they're red, white, and blue. In one ladies’ garden, (she's real fancy) they're gold. Get it? They make the perfect cut flower as they can be as varied in color as the spray paint aisle at the flea market.

Unlike their salty-fried namesake, which will make you drink a ton of tea, chicken feet flowers don’t even need water. That's right. You cut them and drop them in a vase or a plastic bleach bottle with the top cut off. Or you can cut them and leave them lying on the table. No floral gel or funky recipes with pennies or Seven-up. They’ll last for weeks.

Now that you’ve discovered them, help me out. If we’re going to band together to debut chicken feet flowers, we need to think marketing and social media. Do they need an updated cool name? Something very 2022 like Circle-Back-Blossoms or Coronation Carnations. Maybe something to do with Martha’s swimsuit photos and the beauty of natural aging. Is that even ethical? (I mean renaming a flower, not swimsuit thing.)

In one way, we already changed them. Check out Tom’s Fourth of July Flowers.  With the right spray paint, they could do a Lady Gamecock Chicken Foot Bouquet. Or a Tiger-Caught-a-Chicken-Foot Flowers. Make it all up. Lay on the “Deep South is cool” country charm. The more obscure, the better.

Y’all see it in Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and documentaries about roasting pig over pine tree embers. You probably wonder why you’ve never heard of these. Maybe there’s some anthropologist working on it right now. 

More likely, some therapist is working on why I like telling these stories and making things up. You see, I’ve just told you a good one, a big one, a story I pulled right out of my little country-boy head.

I made up Chicken Feet Flowers. They’re just old crinum stems left after flowers fade.  But they are cool, aren't they?  And yep, we really do pick them, clean them, and we really do ship bundles of them as gifts to your friends. (link below).

The truth is that when we put these things in a vase, they’re handsome, they last and last and when I tell that little story I just told you, everybody smiles and falls for chicken feet flowers.