Eudora Welty’s National Historic Landmark home, though never an annual meeting feature, nonetheless has important SGHS connections. Many Society members got their initial introduction to the famed author’s garden world during the 1995 Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes conference, the theme being “The Influence of Women on the Southern Landscape.” In her talk “Where Wonder Expresses Itself: Flowers in Eudora Welty’s Garden and Prose,” garden writer and then Eudora Welty Garden Trust project director, Susan Haltom, illustrated Welty’s skill at weaving a knowledge of plants, garden, and landscape into award winning stories.*
In 2016, this same Susan Halton, daughter-in-law of SGHS charter member Glenn Haltom, became Society president, the in-between decades having seen her deeply involved in restoring the Welty garden, making it open to the public, and joining Jane Roy Brown in producing One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place.
Haltom’s writings overview how the Welty garden was brought to life in 1925 by Eudora’s mother, Chestina, complementing the family’s new Tudor Revival house. Readers also learn that daughter would join mother with the strenuous dig-plant-deadhead-weed cycles demanded by a labor-intensive garden. This tapped even more of their energies in efforts to heal the pain after the 1931 death of husband and father, Christian. Through a look at that daughter’s writing we discover the lessons being taken from the Welty garden…as expressed in publication after publication.
A core element of the site’s mission is helping visitors share those connections through an all-five-senses experience of garden’s structure and plants known to the Weltys from 1925 to 1945, a period when, per a site sign, “Eudora and her mother tended the garden together.” In their explorations, those visitors engage a space deliberately drawn from Arts and Crafts motifs and plantings widely discussed and disseminated at the time. (For a deeply informative talk by current SGHS board member and close student of the Welty garden world, Jessica Russell Hilton, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcKatf9WmWM.)
Of those Arts and Crafts features, the garden’s division into distinct rooms stands out. Shining white arbors and trellises demand notice amid a dominant green setting for each space. A list of important plants can start with numerous varieties of camellias, Eudora’s favorites, including pre-1945 survivors. As elsewhere here, original documents have helped inform restoration planning and interpretation. For example, in a 1941 letter Welty notes having “26 camellias, ranging from 10 feet high to seeds…” Offering winter garden color were the deep pink “Lady Clare” (found under Welty’s bedroom window) and the variegated “Chandleri Elegans,” to name but two. When their time came, roses, too, made their mark, The Washington Post’s noted garden writer, Henry Mitchell, recalling they were once “packed in that garden tight as a trunk…” (Magnolia, Fall 2014.)
Sources cited below detail the many other plants that brightened up Welty’s surroundings as the year progressed, along with ways they appeared in print. These sources also probe her correspondence with fellow gardeners such as her literary agent and friend, Diarmuid Russell, along with esteemed North Carolina writer and landscape architect, Elizabeth Lawrence. As Susan Haltom notes by way of example in the Fall 2014 Magnolia, “both women professed a love for white narcissus and shared the “Silver Bells” (Narcissus moschatus) sold by farm women in the Market Bulletins.” “Silver Bells” still bears witness to their friendship in the Welty garden today.
History professors demand that students not just narrate past events but also set them into a broad “bigger picture” context of meaning: social, gender, economic, intellectual, cultural, etc. Welty scholars such as Susan Haltom and Jessica Russell Hilton are to be applauded for doing just that as they too place Chestina and Eudora into a wide middle-class socio-economic world, theirs being, to again quote Haltom, “the parallel story of the American home gardening movement during the first decades of the twentieth century.” Other researchers are thus challenged to delve further not only into the Welty story but also into the stories of countless Americans of their age. A visit to the Eudora Welty House & Garden offers the perfect place to start.
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As visitors, both actual and virtual, take in the good things done at Eudora Welty’s lifelong home, they are encouraged to note the vital support given to the garden restoration and to One Writer’s Garden by Evelyn Jefcoat and the late Michael Jefcoat of Laurel, Mississippi.
For more details, visit: https://welty.mdah.ms.gov/
*Susan Haltom’s talk can be found in the 1995 conference proceedings, 125-137: https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Influence-of-Women-optimized-2.pdf
Recommended reading: Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown, One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place and Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty: A Biography. Both Susan Haltom and Suzanne Marrs had the benefit of enriching conversations and guidance with their subject during the closing years of Eudora Welty’s life.
Please search the Magnolia index for other excellent writings about Eudora Welty’s gardening and literary life: https://www.southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/250130_index.htm. An instructive comparison of contemporaneous landscapes and later restorations can be made between the Welty garden and that of Corinne Melchers at Belmont (see “Gardens” post of January 30, 2025).
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