The Eudora Welty House Garden

Chestina worked to lay out and plant the garden according to the style of the day, which called for outdoor rooms and flower borders. She and her daughter considered horticulture and garden making to be a learning experience, and they shared with friends both plants and information from the latest gardening literature. Books by Elizabeth Lawrence, Rodale, and Vita Sackville-West were among many volumes on gardening in the Welty library.

 

Bloom was everywhere in the streets, wisteria just ending, Confederate jasmine just beginning. And down in the gardens! — they were deep colored as old rugs in the morning and evening shade. Everybody grew some of the best of everybody else's flowers…
From the short story "Kin"

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.

 

 

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