What it is: This most compelling story is, in fact, the story of an iconic American writer and the garden in which she grew. “One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place” is a rich literary and botanic tale rooted in 1119 Pinehurst St. in Jackson, Miss., the home plot where Welty writes she first discovered her storyteller’s eye. Late in life, Welty sat down with Susan Haltom, a garden preservationist, and revealed much about the nearly lost garden. After she died, in 2001, and her papers became open to the public, her correspondence told plenty more about the garden’s evolution and its profound role in her life. As the garden was brought back to life (led by Haltom), so, too, was its story. In this book, where archival photos are interspersed with Langdon Clay’s eye-popping images from the restored garden, we discover passages from Welty’s unpublished writing and charming excerpts from her personal letters.
What makes it armchair-worthy: From the opening peek down the grassy steps and into the camellia-drenched garden, the reader is pulled deep and wholly into the little-known story of Welty’s connection to this glorious patch of Earth. While the focus is on a particular 20th century garden with deep literary resonance, there is much to be gleaned about American home gardens in the Progressive era, when women were flooding into cities from the farm, and the garden became a luxury rather than a place of hardship and survival. Whether you are drawn in by history or the horticulture, this great writer’s home place will come to life through these pages, and long hold you in its spell.
One fine line: “I never want for anything in winter either, except spring. I think our feelings must keep closer than we imagine to the parabola of the seasons, and that as we have to wait for the spring we feel that much older (really ancient) in its opposite. O Persephone!” — Eudora Welty in a letter to her literary agent, Diarmuid Russell
