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 Kelly Daniels/SDN A Mississippi State campus landscaping crew member, who asked not to be identified digs up a flower bed by the Bost Extension Center parking lot on campus where daffodils once bloomed. The removal of the yellow flowers has left many Mississippi State faculty and staff members upset. By KELLY DANIELS
Starkville Daily News
The removal of numerous daffodil beds across the Mississippi State University campus has many faculty, staff, students and local residents seeing red over the loss of the yellow flowers.
In repeated phone calls to Daily News staff members, several have voiced complaints about the daffodil removal. Many refused to give their names amid concerns over job security.
When reached by telephone Monday, MSU President Robert "Doc" Foglesong asked for a definition of a daffodil in response to accusations that he simply doesn't like daffodils and ordered the flowers removed.
Foglesong, who majored in chemical engineering and not horticulture, said Monday he doesn't know much about flowers in general, but does like them. Foglesong said daffodils grow with sparseness in campus flower beds, and those flower beds need to be overhauled.
"Over a period of years, we have had flower gardens around campus that are not maintained as well as they should and flowers in those gardens have grown to be sparse," said Foglesong on Monday. "If we're going to have flower beds, which I advocate, we're going to have robust flower beds."
A press release by the university on Monday stated that the daffodil bulbs are being pulled in order to be stored.
The university release, which can be found on the MSU Web site and discusses a wider range of campus landscape maintenance issues, stated that the daffodil beds are "receiving regular maintenance and replacement."
However, landscape workers and others are disputing those statements.
One campus worker, Kyle, who asked that only his first name to be published, reported that he has pulled at least 5,000 daffodil bulbs in recent weeks. Kyle said daffodils are supposed to be uprooted after they bloom and later turn brown.
"You can't replace a daffodil now," said Kyle. "They're the first ones to bloom."
One horticulture professor, who refused to be named amid concerns for job security, said daffodils are a persistent bulb, especially in Mississippi.
"Daffodils are intentionally planted in a sparse manner as part of a naturalizing effort," he said, adding that daffodils do not grow more sparsely as time goes on, but rather in clumps.
Echoing Kyle's statements, the professor said that the appropriate time to transplant bulbs is after they have bloomed and the foliage begins to die down.
"No one knows if the herbicide can kill the daffodils, because no one has tried to kill them before," the professor said, adding that workers were using a "very expensive" herbicide called "Image."
The campus opposition to the daffodil removal operation includes a group on the social networking Web site Facebook called "Save the MSU Daffodils!". The Facebook group boasted more than 300 members as of Monday.
Mark Cooper, the senior horticulture major who created the group, also explained how the flowers are supposed to be uprooted.
"You don't dig them up after they've had their cold treatment," he said.
A cold treatment is an exposure to a certain amount of cold so that the plant resets its clock and blooms properly, Cooper said.
"They will not able to photosynthesize and they'll burn all that energy stored last year," he said.
If disturbed and not replanted quickly, the daffodils will have smaller and weaker bulbs, Cooper said.
Cooper said a petition is being planned for submission to the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning to have Foglesong replant the daffodils.
Answering his opposition, Foglesong contends that he and his staff are only attempting to do what is best for the university landscape.
"I find it amazing that people could think that with all the effort we've put in that we are not committed to having a campus as pristine and as beautiful as we can," Foglesong said Monday.
But in response to the press release, Cooper said, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
"If that's the case then they need to just plant more bulbs," Cooper said. "I don't see the point of weed-eating and herbicide."
Jim Jones, executive director of facilities management, said that he didn't know if any one individual first came up with the idea of pulling the daffodils. The MSU Facilities Management Division now includes landscape operations under a reorganization last year.
"I know what you're trying to get," he said, when asked if he had been given specific orders to have the yellow flowers pulled. Jones said that the university planned on keeping the bulbs.
"Why would we dig them up if we didn't plan on keeping them?" he said.
Most of the daffodils were donated by Jacqueline Van Zyverden, owner of the Meridian bulb distributor, Van Zyverden Inc., which sells 450 million bulbs annually across the U.S. and to Canada. Van Zyverden could not be reached for comment Monday.
Additional statements from Foglesong and Jones about campus landscape issues can be found in the news release on the university's website at http://www.msstate.edu. |
