The Eudora Welty Garden: Where every flower tells a story

• Eudora’s garden, once her mother’s, is a living testament to history.

This April 13th, Eudora Welty would have been 116 years old. The iconic Mississippi writer is one of America’s most significant authors. Her attention to detail is immaculate, both in her writing and garden. It is not uncommon for both to come together on the same page because every flower has a story in the garden at the Eudora Welty House. This unique connection between her writing and her garden, where every flower is a story waiting to be told, is a source of inspiration and intrigue for literature enthusiasts and gardening fans alike.

Eudora’s garden, once her mother’s, is a living testament to history. Chestina Welty, the mastermind behind the garden’s beautiful landscape, designed it in 1925 at 1119 Pinehurst Street, in the now historic Belhaven neighborhood. Her care and intention are evident in the garden’s layout, ensuring something lovely blooms each season. Winter brings stunning camellias and pansies, spring offers larkspur, hollyhocks, and snapdragons, while the Mississippi summer brings phlox, zinnias, and blue salvias to life. The year ends with Autumn’s blooms: asters, chrysanthemums, and spider lilies. The Eudora Welty garden is most notably recognized for its beautiful roses, which climb over the trellises in the lower garden. Chestina’s favorite roses bring to life the phrase ‘my mother’s garden,’ often spoken by Eudora.

Eudora’s favorite flower was the camellia. This is why you will find more than 30 varieties of camellias in the garden today. Remember that Eudora Welty planted many of these camellias herself as you stop to admire their unique shapes and colors.

“I think that people have lost the working garden. We used to get down on our hands and knees. The absolute contact between hand and the earth, the intimacy of it, that is the instinct of a gardener. People like to classify, categorize, and that takes away from creativity. I think the artist – in every sense of the word – learns from what’s individual; that’s where the wonder expresses itself.” ~Eudora Welty 

One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown captures the story of the Welty Garden, bringing both words and flowers to life through the inspiration of Eudora Welty and her love of writing, gardening, and the love of her mother’s garden. The book explores the history of the Welty garden and its influence on Welty’s writing. It also includes unpublished writings and excerpts from Welty’s private correspondence about the garden.

Susan Haltom and a dedicated core of volunteers carefully and lovingly restored the garden to its original state—the 1925-1945 time period when Eudora worked side by side with her mother in the garden. This restoration is not just a preservation of history but a continuation of Eudora’s legacy, instilling a sense of reverence and respect for the past. Haltom worked closely with Eudora Welty in the years before her death, learning about her vision for the garden and leading the restoration of the garden, ensuring it reflected Welty’s mother’s original designs as well as Eudora’s observations. 

Upon entering the garden, there is a tangible sense of authenticity. The garden is storied, and each bloom is a detail that paints a picture as you wind through nearly an acre of gardens with heirloom plants, arbors, and trellises.

Eudora Welty lived in the Belhaven neighborhood for 75 years. Her house was her home, and so was her garden. In many of her writings, you will find details of nature that are rich and symbolic and inevitably representative of the garden. The garden was not just a backdrop for her stories but a living, breathing character that influenced her writing and provided her with endless inspiration, evoking a sense of the profound impact of nature on creativity. With 150 kinds of plants in her stories, Eudora Welty’s legacy lives on through her words, of course, and also through The Welty Garden.

“Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.” ~Eudora Welty

The Welty Garden is a place where intention and love bloom and memories are stored. Eudora once called her garden a “container of memory” that held the memories of her life and the people she loved. We know through several books and writings that Eudora loved being home and entertaining people in her home and garden. Ironically, such a prolific writer gained her biggest inspiration from the house she grew up in and later moved back into and the gardens she planted with her own hands—-the same hands that wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, among many other literary treasures. 

Guests may visit the garden Tuesday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m.