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

One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place by Susan Haltom. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781617031199.

Winner of the 2012 Eudora Welty Prize By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents house, but the garden―and the friends who remembered it―had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mothers garden.” By the time Welty died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Weltys private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Weltys private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writers Garden also draw connections between Weltys gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Weltys mothers generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, womens clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this gardens history―and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century―with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.