Growing up in Mississippi, I was taught a reverence for the rich legacy of our otherwise challenged state’s writers. Eudora was a household word, and I remember thinking as a child that her parents were smart to give her a name unique enough to stand alone in representing talent.
As a reader, I have always found Eudora Welty’s sentences more convoluted than our other native son genius William Faulkner’s, and her characters just as complicated (largely in their familiarity to the people around me) as are his.
After reading Susan Haltom’s One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place, I have a new found appreciation for this staple of Southern literature. So much so that I am naming my new and latest in a long string of Golden Retrievers Eudora. For anyone who knows me, and my passions for books and gardens and blonde dogs, enough said regarding the lasting impression this book made on me.
Susan Haltom introduced me to Eudora Welty in a way that the American Literature professors at Ole Miss failed to accomplish. Coaxed down from her Pulitzer literary pedestal, Eudora Welty becomes as human as the everyday Mississippi people in her novels and short stories, she and her mother Chestina the same sort of Southern lady Mississippi mothers and daughters with whom I grew up.
My sister, herself an accomplished and award winning Mississippi architectural historian, sent me this book as a four-months-early Christmas gift. She called to tell me that she simply could not wait for me to read it. “It will be your all time favorite garden book,” she promised. “I sat down and devoured it, cover to cover.”
I scratched my head. Last time I looked, my sister’s yard needed mowing and her “gardening” involved two tomato plants desperate for a drink of water. My sister gushing over a gardening book was instantly intriguing.
When One Writer’s Garden arrived a few days later, I too read it straight through. On my second read, fascinated by the photography, making margin notes, folding down corners of my favorite pages, slapping on sticky notes, I defaced that book nearly to death highlighting passages to savor again and again.
It is not simply a gardening book but a story to cherish on many levels. As a love letter to an iconic Southern writer, whom Haltom had the privilege of knowing in Miss Welty’s dying days, the book takes us inside of a personality and places her in a family framework in such a way that reading it brought back many memories of the cherished relationship I had with my mother. My mother was no more a gardener than my sister, but I would have given her this book, chronicling the relationship of Eudora Welty and her mother, as the ultimate Mother’s Day thank you.
I am going to give the book to my daughter for Mother’s Day. Perhaps any close comrades mother and daughter team could find themselves reflected in Chestina and Eudora, but I was particularly struck by their both similar and contrasting approaches to the garden, with its inevitable successes and failures. I am a Chestina-like compulsive saver of plant tags and compiler of complicated garden journals, and my Jenny, like Chestina’s Eudora, thumbs her nose at the weeds as she smells the roses.
Eudora in the garden
From Chestina’s journal, October 14, 1937:
“My garden diary always plays out about the first week in May, but I’ll begin in fall this time…but have resolved to stop trying to grow annuals. I am going to have perennials in my borders to keep blooms of some sort all the time and try to plan for a good succession of blooms…”
February 3, 1938:
“I resolved not to grow any more annuals—but today I ordered $1.35 worth of seeds.”
Oh, how I relate!
As someone who has spent the past 15 years trying to resurrect an 80+ year old garden gone to ruin, the historical perspective of a 1920s garden was insightful and informative. Chestina Welty’s plant lists were like a gift as I continue to compile speculations on what the original owners of my garden would have planted.
More words of wisdom from Chestina:
“Curiously enough, the vision of the gardener seems to grow faster than the garden. He who finds profusion of bloom with no attempt at garden design satisfying this spring will likely be planning to bring about a more ordered arrangement next year, and the gardener who thinks of his garden as a beautiful picture or a carefully planned retreat may soon be digging and fertilizing in an effort to secure more and finer blossoms in his well-designed plot. Thus does the gardener grow up to his garden, and thus does the garden continue to be satisfying though never perfect.”
Susan Haltom tending Eudora's garden as an ongoing labor of love.
Susan Haltom writes of her meeting with Eudora Welty, in the writer’s home, on a sultry summer afternoon in Jackson, Mississippi:
“Sheer curtains fluttered in the breeze, and I noticed the room was filled with letters and books—on the tables, in piles on the sofa, in towers on the floor filling bookcases. The room smelled of books. It smelled of letters. Miss Welty welcomed us in her husky southern drawl, and I will never forget her next words: ‘I cannot bear to look out the window and see what has become of my mother’s garden.’”
“At the far back of the yard we found a wavy line of spireas, nandinas, and some camellias, silhouetted against a bamboo forest. A tangle of vines had strangled these mature shrubs, shrouding them in green. Poison ivy lurked everywhere, thorny green vines snaked above the soil from underground tubers, and invasive Japanese honeysuckle twisted and choked everything in sight….My gardener’s eye sized up the reclamation project. There were no snakes of pools of dirty water {as neighbors had threatened of in complaining to the city of Jackson about the state of the yard}, but it might truly be hell to do.”
She further quotes from a conversation with Welty:
“That was a happy time, when the garden was new. We used to have….” Then she stopped. “That is a sad phrase.”
Haltom writes:
“The last time I had read her short stories was in high-school English class, twenty-five years earlier. With age and a new perspective, I realized how she used plants and flowers to instill a sense of place, and that many of the same plants she mentioned in her prose were still growing in her yard….the more I read, the more I became convinced of this garden’s influence on her work. It was also becoming clear to me that the garden had its own story, and that its story had many layers…I was convinced that I had a mission here: to ensure that when this home was eventually restored, it would be surrounded by a garden that would reflect the life and times—and favorite plants—of its gardener-author. It was obvious that the word ‘garden’ was an active verb to her, not a noun.”
Eudora Welty died in July of 2001. The restored garden was opened to the public in 2004, two years before the house became a destination for literary pilgrims and received its designation as a National Historic Landmark, the highest significance the federal government bestows on a property.
A rose covered arbor in the Welty garden.
Susan Haltom concludes:
“Many people wonder if a garden is meant to live on after its creator. Of course we recognize that things can never truly stay the same, since a garden exists in time, with tree canopy changes and alterations in the beds and borders. But meaning, in a garden, goes deeper than mere decoration or the plants themselves, and that is why I wanted to share this gardener’s story.”
With final words of wisdom from Eudora, which I have printed out and put in my bag of garden tools:
“Weeding is good for you. It’s not an emergency. You must be patient and calm.”
Susan Haltom will discuss her book at two functions in Birmingham on May 10. She will lecture at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens from 2-3 p.m., admission $5, as a fundraiser for the BBG Library, followed by a traditional southern garden party at the home of Cathy Adams, 2431 Aberdeen Road, from 4:30-6. $50 admission includes a signed copy of One Writer’s Garden and benefits the Literacy Council of Central Alabama. Both events are open to the public, reservations requested for garden party. For more information visit www.bbgardens.org and www.literacy-council.org.
