Eudora Welty's Garden Restored

From the US National Portrait Gallery

Its always heart-warming and encouraging to be able to report a success story.  And here is a particularly good one, which involves the garden of the celebrated American author Eudora Wetly (1909-2001.)  Perhaps best known for her 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist's Daughter (1972), Welty was also a great garden lover. 

Eudora Wetly's house in Jackson, MI.

Later in life she bemoaned that the garden of her house in in Jackson, Mississippi  where she had lived almost continuously since childhood, had fallen into decay.  According to The Christian Science Monitor: 'During the 1980s, Welty had donated her house to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, with the understanding that the house would be turned into a museum after she died. In August of 1994, Susan Haltom, who worked at the department and had an interest in garden design, showed up at Welty’s doorstep along with other department employees. With the assistance of other volunteers, they offered to slowly restore the garden that Welty and her late mother had once tended to perfection, creating an Eden of daylilies, roses, nandinas, camellias, azaleas and other Southern horticultural favorites.'

Now the story of this remarkable garden, its owner and restoration is told in a new book, One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place by Susan Haltom, Jane Roy Brown and Langdon Clay.