The view from Eudora Welty's window

The Pulitzer Prize winner's garden wove its way into her fiction and letters.

By Jane Roy Brown | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 8, 2007 edition

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JACKSON, MISS. - Through the front windows in the upstairs room where she worked and slept, the writer Eudora Welty could gaze out on neighbors strolling the sidewalk, and on the great live oaks shading the campus of the Presbyterian college across the street. But mainly she looked out on the old water oak in the front yard and the winter-blooming camellias directly below, their white and magenta blossoms floating on glossy leaves. This garden, designed by Welty's mother, Chestina, enfolded the house in artfully accented green, providing relief from the long, slow boil of the Mississippi summer. Throughout her life, the garden wove its way into her fiction and framed moments of quiet epiphany in her letters.

In Welty's fiction, flowers may bloom as images of interior churnings more felt than seen: "A blushing sensitivity sprang up in her every year at the proper time like a flower of the season, like the Surprise Lilies that came up with no leaves and overnight in Miss Nell's yard," she wrote in the short story "June Recital."

And in "A Curtain of Green," a grieving woman throws herself into gardening. Each day, when the character wanders into her garden, she enters a spiritual wilderness of sorts: "To a certain extent, she seemed not to seek for order, but to allow an overflowering, as if she consciously ventured forever a little farther, a little deeper, into her life in the garden."

Welty was 16 when, in 1925, she and her two younger brothers moved with their parents to 1119 Pinehurst Street – a newly built house in Jackson's new subdivision of Belhaven. After completing college in Wisconsin, Welty moved to New York. But in 1931, her father became ill, and she returned home. When he died a few months later, she stayed on and began working seriously on writing and photography, while her mother threw herself into gardening. Although Welty traveled and mingled with other artists and writers, she and her mother lived here for the rest of their lives.

Welty bequeathed her unpretentious house to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) for use as a literary house museum. (It has since been declared a National Historic Landmark.) After her passing in 2001, MDAH, with help from the private Welty Foundation, began restoring the garden to its peak period of 1925-45. Though most of the work was done before the house opened to the public in 2006, Susan Haltom, the garden historian overseeing the project, says the garden is "a work in progress."

"This isn't a show garden, it's a working garden," says Mary Alice White, director of the Welty House, who is also Welty's niece. "Eudora didn't want to make it something it wasn't."

After her mother died in 1966, Eudora Welty still referred to the yard around the family's Tudor-revival house as "my mother's garden" and to herself as "my mother's yard man." Any working gardener will see the amount of love and labor the women invested in their three-quarter-acre yard. Divided into outdoor "rooms" filled with old-fashioned perennials, the garden is characteristic of southern household gardens of the period. Chestina Welty's talent as an amateur garden designer can be seen in her sophisticated handling of space. She laid out the three main garden rooms to provide pleasing views from the house. She then "furnished" each room with plants of different heights: Flowering shrubs rise behind floral borders, all backed by a screen of conifers and broad-leafed evergreens.

The front lawn flows into a tree-sheltered space in front of the porch, where a collection of Camellia japonica, salted with a few Camellia sasanqua, takes center stage. Daughter and mother shared a lifelong love of these flowering shrubs. Welty occasionally sent a box of fresh-cut camellias to her agent, Diarmuid Russell, on the overnight train to New York.

One of three reconstructed arbors marks the passage from the porch space to the upper garden behind the house. Between a curving border and a cutting garden, a rebuilt arbor for climbing roses frames the lower garden and its bed of early hybrid tea and old garden roses. Beyond the lower garden, backed by a bamboo thicket, lies the woodland garden, where the reconstructed clubhouse stands. Welty once quipped that she retreated here to "privately edit the Radio News and chew gum," while working for a local radio station in the 1930s.

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