One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place

295 Pages·2011·13.3 MB·English

by  Susan Haltom

One Writer’s
Garden
Eudora W Elty’s HomE PlacE
Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown
Photographs by Langdon Clay
university press of mississippi jackson
Z
iii
www.upress.state.ms.us
The development and publication of this book were made possible
through the generous support of Evelyn and Michael Jefcoat.
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
All color photographs are by Langdon Clay unless otherwise credited.
Excerpts from Eudora Welty: A Biography copyright © 2005 by Suzanne Marrs,
reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Copyright © 2011 by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown
Photographs copyright © Langdon Clay
All rights reserved
Manufactured in China through Four Colour Imports, Inc.
First printing 2011
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haltom, Susan.
One writer’s garden : Eudora Welty’s home place / Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown ; photo-
graphs by Langdon Clay.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-119-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-120-5 (ebook) 1. Welty, Eudora,
1909–2001—Homes and haunts—Mississippi—Jackson. 2. Authors, American—Homes and
haunts—Mississippi—Jackson. 3. Gardens, American—Mississippi—Jackson—History—20th
century. 4. Gardens—Conservation and restoration—Mississippi—Jackson. I. Brown, Jane Roy. II.
Clay, Langdon, 1949– III. Title.
SB466.U65J334 2011
712’.609760904—dc22 2011000701

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
iv  Y  spring, 1920s
For Evelyn and Michael Jefcoat
Literary gardeners of Laurel, Mississippi,
patrons of American gardens,
supporters of garden restoration,
and champions of this book
“ ‘Etoile de Hollande’ is the standard of excellence.”
—from How to Grow Roses,
J. Horace McFarland and Robert Pyle, 1937
vi  Y  spring, 1920s
contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction xix
part i—Spring, 1920s
Chapter 1. Chestina 3

Chapter 2. “When the Garden Was New” 21
Chapter 3. Progressive Women and Their Roots in Gardening 43
part ii—Summer, 1930s
Chapter 4. “Meeting Death Head On” 63
Chapter 5. “Medicine to the Soul” 75
Chapter 6. “You and Me, Here” 101
part iii —Fall, 1940s
Chapter 7. “The Subject Was Flowers” 123
Chapter 8. “In the Fall I Will Miss You Then” 139
Chapter 9. “Flowers Are Older Than War” 155
Chapter 10. “Happy and Thankful for Much” 173
vii
part iv—Winter, Postwar and Beyond
Chapter 11. “Not a Garden Any More, but What It Is” 195
Epilogue: “It Would Be Like Hell to Do” 213
Appendices
Appendix I: Decades of Welty Plants 235
Appendix II: Original Plant List for 1119 Pinehurst Street 237
Appendix III: Annuals in the Welty Garden 238
Appendix IV: Roses in the Welty Garden 240
Appendix V: Partial List of Plants in Welty Prose 242
Appendix VI: Resources for Historic Landscape Preservation 244
Appendix VII: Discussion Questions for Book Clubs 245
Notes 246
Bibliography 256
Credits 261
Index 262
viii  contents
preface
This is the story of a garden at the home of a famous American writer,
Eudora Welty (1909–2001). Although the house and garden at 1119 Pine-
hurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi, are attractive, comfortable, and well
made, it is fair to say that neither is noteworthy solely as a work of art.
Their association with Welty is the main reason they have been preserved
for the public.
Henry Mitchell, a fellow southerner and long-running garden colum-
nist at the Washington Post, once described Welty as “Rose-Gardener,
Realist, Storyteller of the South.” Welty is best known as a short-story
writer, and the garden has a compelling story of its own. Welty gave Su-
san Haltom permission to tell it after their conversations, in the last de-
cade of Welty’s life, revealed a nearly lost garden. Without her blessing,
this book would not exist. By this time, most of the other people who
would have remembered the garden had passed away. Very few of Welty’s
younger friends and acquaintances knew that she had been a gardener,
and literary scholars had no reason to associate the abundant references
to flowers and gardens in Welty’s writing with her own hands-on experi-
ence. On the few occasions when Welty spoke about the garden in her
later years, she usually called it “my mother’s garden.”
Eudora’s mother, Chestina Welty (1883–1966) did, in fact, create and
design the garden, in 1925. Her choices of plants, colors, forms, and archi-
tectural details displayed her personal preferences. They also echoed the
prevailing style and taste of her generation and her social circumstances,
which in turn mirrored wider trends and influences: Progressive-era op-
timism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women’s clubs,
garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant
introductions, and garden writing. Most of the middle-class gardens of
this period, extraordinary or not, have been lost to changing taste and
ownership. The scarcity of similar gardens makes this small garden even
more significant.
ix