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Preservation Case Study: Eudora Welty’s Garden “Mrs. Larkin’s garden was a large, densely grown plot running downhill behind the small white house where she lived alone. . . . The sun and the rain that beat down so heavily that summer had not kept her from working there daily. Now the intense light like a tweezers picked out her clumsy, small figure in its old pair of men’s overalls rolled up at the sleeves and trousers, separated it from the thick leaves, and made it look strange and yellow as she worked with a hoe—over-vigorous, disreputable, and heedless.” This excerpt from Eudora Welty’s short story “A Curtain of Green” is one example of how the writer wove the themes of gardening and gardens into her work. As for the over-vigorous gardener, “that sounds like her mother, and her mother’s garden,” says Susan Haltom, a garden restoration consultant at the Eudora Welty House in Jackson, Mississippi. Haltom recalls that Eudora Welty (1909–2001), even in her later years, referred to the garden as “my mother’s garden”—and to herself as “my mother’s yard boy”—despite the fact that the author lived in the house for seventy-five years, nearly fifty of them by herself. The garden, restored to the period from 1925 to 1945, when the garden and Welty were both coming into their own, opened to the public for the first time in April 2004. The Tudor-style house, built in 1925 by Eudora’s parents, Christian and Chestina Welty, opened as a literary museum in 2006. The property is owned by Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Mary Alice White, Eudora Welty’s niece and the director of the Welty House Museum, describes the garden as “typically southern,” divided into “rooms” and planted with natives and popular old-fashioned perennials. Designed by Chestina Welty on three-quarters of an acre, the garden contains two backyard rooms, the upper and lower gardens, bounded by privet hedges and separated by arbors, trellises, and steps. The upper garden features a perennial border and a cutting bed. The lower garden holds Chestina Welty’s favorite roses. Spigelias and a native azalea line the west side of the house. A camellia room, containing about thirty varieties, lies on the east side. “Camellias were Eudora’s favorite,” White says. “When Eudora traveled, her mother would ship her fresh camellias in a box on an overnight train.” The restoration has been a labor of love led by Haltom, who wrote a cultural landscape report in 2001 based on interviews with the writer, Welty’s photographs, and Chestina Welty’s garden journals, plant lists, and diagrams. Along the way, she had help from many sources, including LALH trustee Michael Jefcoat of Laurel, Mississippi, who, with his wife, Evelyn, has been an active supporter. The foundation contacted Jefcoat after discovering a letter from him to Welty, saved among her private papers. Jefcoat now serves on the board of the garden committee. The garden restoration began in 1994, several years after the elderly Welty, who had deeded her house to the Department of Archives and History, had lost her longtime gardener and the yard had been in decline. “She had big china-blue eyes, which she rolled toward the window and said, ‘I can’t bear to look out there and see what’s become of my mother’s garden,’” recalls Haltom. She started pulling out the honeysuckle and poison ivy that covered many of the beds. “Then I’d read her stories, and I began to see how much this place influenced her work, and how important it was to restore it,” she says. “When Eudora died she knew we were working on this, and she was pleased.” Photographs: |
