A MDAH Publication  |  Volume 46 No. 3  |  March 2004

Welty House Garden Opens to Public

A restored southern garden
For over sixty years Eudora Welty wrote stories and novels and tended her garden at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson. At her death she left her home to the state of Mississippi. On April 3-5, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History will open to the public the Welty House garden-restored to its former and highest glory, the period of 1925-1945, when the garden was cared for by both Eudora and her mother, Chestina Welty.

In the opening celebration, "A Garden Reborn," guests are invited to tour the restored garden and to attend special programs at the Old Capitol Museum, the Old Capitol Inn, and the William F. Winter Archives and History Building.

The Eudora Welty House is projected to open as a literary house museum in 2005, after the house has been brought up to museum standards.

The garden is born
Chestina Welty, Eudora's mother, planned the Pinehurst Street garden when the family built their new home in 1925 in Jackson's Belhaven neighborhood (now a historic district). That year Eudora graduated from Central High and left for college. At the death of her father, Christian Welty, in 1931, Eudora returned to Jackson from New York. As she began work at two new jobs in Jackson, she also began to write her first stories. Through these years, Eudora and her mother developed the three-quarter-acre lot into an extensive garden, one typical of southern gardens of that time.

I was my mother's yard boy.
Eudora Welty

At its height, the Welty garden featured, in addition to the front yard, a rose garden with a trellis, two arbors, an extensive perennial border, cutting garden, a woodland garden, and a large camellia collection.

After her mother's death in 1966, Eudora tended the garden herself, but she always referred to it as "Mother's garden." Her readers know that Eudora Welty loved the garden and was a knowledgeable gardener: the names of flowers and plants—wild and domestic—of Mississippi abound in her fiction.

I like the work in the yard, never get tired, and can think out there— or maybe it's dreaming.
Eudora Welty

The restoration
The garden is being restored to the period of 1925-45, when the garden best manifested the vision the two women shared for it. Most gardens of that era were created using locally available plants, but the Weltys mail-ordered plants and ordered seeds from gardening catalogs or from farmers and gardeners who advertised in the "Mississippi Market Bulletin."

MDAH's garden consultant Susan Haltom conducted extensive interviews with Eudora Welty about the garden's history. The accuracy of the restoration project has been made possible in large part by Welty's extensive documentation and by her mother's garden journals, which noted the layout of beds and bloom schedules. As a young photographer, Eudora would climb out the window of the second-floor sleeping room and take photographs from the roof; these photographs also provide documentation of the garden for the project.

Beds—no.
Borders—yes.
Notation, Chestina Welty's garden journal

The Welty garden features more than thirty varieties of camellias, some of them grafted by Eudora herself. Eudora and Chestina Welty shared these wintertime flowers with friends in the snowy North, sending them cushioned blooms on the overnight train.

Eudora Welty loved bulbs, and the upper garden is filled with them. She collected zephranthes, or rain lilies, surprise lilies, milk-and-wine lilies, spider lilies, and her favorite, hyacinthus-French Roman hyacinths. Chestina created garden borders that included day lilies, phlox, stokesia, Easter lilies, chrysanthemums, and jonquils.

Roses were Chestina's favorite flower, but they figure largely in Eudora's fiction, as well. In the sunny lower garden are climbers such as Silver Moon, Lady Banks, cl. Cecile Brunner, cl. American Beauty, Dr. W. Van Fleet, as well as a number of early twentieth-century hybrid tea roses.

The lower garden and cutting garden furnished blooms and greenery for indoors. In the cutting garden the Weltys planted annuals, both in fall for springtime blooms and in spring for summer-hollyhocks, snapdragons, larkspur, ragged robins, zinnias, cosmos, and many others.

Stretching from the edge of the lower garden to the back of the property is the woodland garden, with mature pines and hardwoods towering over more camellias, spider lilies, and oxblood lilies. The back border of the Welty garden is a thick canebrake planted by Chestina Welty.

MDAH Thanks 2003 Donors to the Eudora Welty Foundation

Published by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History • Elbert R. Hilliard, director • Chrissy Wilson, editor
Please send correspondence to: MHN, P.O. Box 571, Jackson, MS 39205 or email to pubinfo@mdah.state.ms.us