The Naked Florist

by Leah Tuckwiller
Photos by Mary Baldwin @ The Golden Rabbit

Gary Rushing, under the name My Naked Florist, is a newcomer to the area, a New Jersey native who finds himself in the Greenbrier Valley by way of New York. This, even, may not come as a surprise, given the rich collection of people who gather in the area, but the young person with the tropical print shirt and the wire-rimmed glasses hardly seems like he came from a background of industrial radiography — x-raying the ground for oil and gas pipelines. His iced coffee makes a circle of condensation on the little round table at the Wild Bean, and he seems perfectly at home in this small town in the wild mountains.

In fact, he seems like exactly the kind of person — observant, creative, and a far cry from oil fields and hard hats — responsible for the arrangements in places like The Golden Rabbit or Briergarten, in which foraged branches reach delicately past the golden eyes of coral zinnias or gem-green grasses wave gently in the wind from opening doors. If they were landscapes, Rushing’s arrangements would be fairytale forests, elegant not in spite of their wildness, but because of it.

Gary Rushing, my naked florist.

The need for a change crept over Rushing the same way it sneaks up on so many others — he knew even as he was doing the radiography work that it wasn’t good for him, wasn’t good for the planet, and wasn’t what he wanted to spend the rest of his life doing. Instead, he turned to flowers, one of the best expressions of the green world and an industry in which he could work with his conscience turned toward a smaller footprint.

“When I first moved away from my family and I got my first apartment, I just always kept flowers in the house and started playing around with it,” Rushing said. At the urging of his partner at the time, he made the decision to pursue floristry, despite the fact that he hadn’t realized it was a career path until it was under his feet. “I was like, ‘this is such a new field, I’m learning about it through Instagram.’ That's so strange, but it worked and I networked and I just did it.”

It did work, and Rushing was able to freelance for different floral companies in New York for a time. Though the experience was valuable, it still wasn’t quite what he wanted. In an early job interview, he even told a potential boss that in fact, what he wanted was to do what she did. Not in her particular business, but on his own — “I’m not going to steal her job,” he says now, laughing, “I don’t want her job, I just want that title at some point. Just being frank!”

With another company, Rushing regularly worked with restaurants to create feature arrangements, and just before his move here with his current partner, who came to Lewisburg to attend the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, business was booming. Clients were keeping to their schedules even as global events became more and more uncertain — but that only lasted until March.

In the span of a couple of weeks, Rushing says, restaurant clients were having to put floral services on hold as doors closed due to the pandemic. Rushing was commuting across the city by bike, trying to avoid public transportation like subways for both floral and safety reasons. 

“I felt like I was in like a video game, trying to dodge invisible things in the air,” he says.

He made one final floral call on a Monday, to care for the plants in a restaurant which also housed a 60-year-old tree in the atrium. (“They moved it from outside to inside,” he recalls, “it was not happy.”) With the coronavirus situation worsening, Rushing and his partner made the decision to leave on a Friday, packed a U-Haul on Saturday, and were in Lewisburg by 4:30 AM the following Monday.

It was a change of pace, certainly, and not an unwelcome one — Rushing cites a buzzing in his head he didn’t even know was there, which faded to silence after moving — but it also brought certain challenges, like availability. New York City, with its jungle of a floral district on 28th Street (and another growing in Brooklyn, Rushing says), had tropicals and exotics and created growing seasons. West Virginia has less of that, it’s true, but what she lacks in city blocks of wholesalers, she makes up for in natural beauty both wild and cultivated.

Many of Rushing’s latest arrangements use foraged branches and greenery, and he notes that his style has changed a bit since getting away from the city. He leans across the circle of the little cafe table to flip through pictures on his phone of a massive arrangement in the sunroom of his own home, created just after the move for a project that the pandemic brought to an uncertain stalemate. Though the project is still up in the air, the installation was one of his first big undertakings in the Greenbrier Valley. 

“Basically, we built this like forestscape in my house,” Rushing says. “I had this sunroom in the back that was just all windows, and had some skylights. And Tyler's dad built me this backdrop and I painted this canvas these earthy colors on the backdrop, and just built this space out.”

The installation towers to the ceiling, the thumbprint petals of little pink sweet peas springing up from a massive branch and sprawling moss (all found in his first neighborhood in Lewisburg), and tucked in next to movie-perfect California roses.

“So I finish the thing,” he says, despite the brakes on the “official” project. “And instead of just letting it go to waste, I had this socially distanced get together thing. So I invited Deva [Wagner] and I invited some of Tyler's first year classmates, and some second years that we met, and other townspeople that I had met, other shop owners. I just told them all to come over and check it out. So we did that instead.”

Rushing staged a stool found at Patina in the middle of the installation, making it an interactive space for observers to become part of the display, placing themselves in this beautiful indoor forest, a magical reflection of the wild glory of the West Virginia woods.

In West Virginia, Rushing has cultivated some of that glory for himself with the crop from his newest project, a full floral garden nurtured up from seeds. 

“I'm trying to do a more self-sustained operation, which is the goal,” Rushing says. Ever since seeing a completely self-sustaining setup on the Apple TV show Homes, “it was like, ‘that's a goal.’ I don't know when that's going to happen, but, let's call that a ten- to twelve-year plan.”

While it’s been a bit of a learning curve, Rushing says, as he figures out the slope of his garden and the proper amount of drainage, everything, down to his neighbor’s cows, has “been amazing. I'm in the garden, planting stuff, I would turn around and there'd be like fifteen cows staring. They’re fascinated by everything. I'd play music and they'd come over. They really liked Bob Marley.”

The other issue, of course, was that Rushing didn’t know anyone in the area — but that wasn’t a problem for long. He started by hanging out at farmer’s markets, community events, and the Greenbrier River Trail. After his dreamy forest installation at home, he gained friends and connections aplenty in the Valley. Now, over year later, Rushing’s arrangements and installations can be seen in places like the Briergarten, The Golden Rabbit, and more — he’s even making plans to install a cooler in The Golden Rabbit, to sell little cut arrangements and bouquets of his own home-grown zinnias, silene, garden roses, and more, sourced from his own garden and other Lewisburg growers.

So far, he’s met nothing but support. “Here, people really just do what they do,” he says. “Everyone wants to know what you do, so that they can tell people about what you do. The passing around of information, it’s all very communal.”

That community, he tells me, is what makes him want to stay a while, and experience the Greenbrier Valley as a permanent fixture, and not just as a newcomer.

“For me, here, it's been easier to ‘do me.’ If you're fulfilling yourself, you're absolutely going to be able to fulfill other people's needs or wants,” Rushing explains. “I think it's like this place is absolutely giving me the space to do that. Hence, the buzziness leaving that I didn't even know was there! After two to three weeks of being here, I was like, ‘I feel different, in a really good way.’ It's been nice that people are getting excited about it.”

Keep your eyes peeled for Rushing’s miniature explosions of the forest in The Golden Rabbit and on Instagram @mynakedflorist.