Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012 - (Page 286)

College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for the novel, The Optimist’s Daughter. Jimmy Carter awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Literature in 1980. Among her writings are five novels and several dozen short stories. Southern garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence, who lived in Raleigh and later in Charlotte, corresponded with Welty. They met in the late 1930s in Raleigh, probably through a mutual friend. Through their correspondence Lawrence became acquainted with Eudora’s mother, Chestina. According to Emily Wilson’s No One Gardens Alone: A Life of Elizabeth Lawrence, there was a closer affinity initially with Chestina, who was a “kindred spirit in the garden.” That friendship began when Chestina wrote Lawrence a letter praising her on the occasion of the publication in 1942 of A Southern Garden. Chestina had an interest in the blooming dates of flowers, which Elizabeth also carefully noted in all her books. When Lawrence was on a lecture tour in 1944 in Mississippi, she visited Chestina and Eudora in Jackson for the first time and immediately became at ease when she entered the garden to admire Chestina’s roses around the Tudorstyle house. When Lawrence moved to Charlotte, Eudora visited her there, the last time in 1982 (Lawrence died in 1985). Lawrence credits Welty for introducing her to the Mississippi Market Bulletin, which both Chestina and Eudora read. Lawrence writes in Gardening for Love: the Market Bulletins: “Years ago Eudora Welty told me about the ladies who sell flowers through the mail and advertise in the Mississippi Market Bulletin . . . She put my name on the mailing list.” In these bulletins, farmers advertised, free of charge, their crops, cattle, and horses—even dogs—while their wives advertised garden seed and bulbs “for pin money.” “Their advertisements show the customs of the country people, their humor, and their way of speaking. Like Eudora’s novels, the market bulletins are a social history of the Deep South,” Lawrence wrote. The Welty garden was Chestina’s but gradually it became Eudora’s as her mother spent less time in the garden during years of declining health. After Chestina died in 1966, Eudora took full charge of the garden, although, according to Susan Haltom’s new book, One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place (University of Mississippi 2011), Eudora always referred to it as “my mother’s garden.” It included an Upper Garden and Lower Garden separated by an arbor with roses, a collection of camellias, a cut-flower garden and woodland, and numerous bulbs, annuals, and perennials such as bearded iris and daylilies. In 1980, Welty gave the house and garden to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) with the right to live there until she died, directing that the house become a museum after that. In 1994, Haltom, who was working at the MDAH, visited the Welty garden, then grown up with weeds, bushes, and tangles of vines and poison ivy. She recalls Welty, frail and no longer able to care for the garden, telling her, “I cannot bear to look out the window and see what has become of my mother’s garden.” Haltom began a long-term effort, with volunteers and professional assistance and advice from organizations such as the Garden Conservancy, to rehabilitate the garden, and eventually “the lost garden was coming to light.” The 286 Rock Garden Quarterly Vol. 70 (3)

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012

Digital Quarterly
Expanding Panayoti's Axioms
Photo Contest 2012
Photographing Alpine Plants: A Landscape Point of View
NARGS 2013 Election Timetable
Rock Gardening from Scratch - Seeds
Kim Blaxland and the Violets of North America
Viola pedata
Violas, Kim, and Us - A Celebration
Cooking Native Japanese Plants
Carl Gehenio Memorial Trough Show
Fire in the Hole: Phlox across Colorado
Rebuilding a Rock Garden in Pittsburgh
A Remarkable Garden: David Douglas and the Shrub-steppe of the Columbia Plateau
Bookshelf - Reviews
Swedish Dreams
Treasurer's Report
Bulletin Board
2012 - Eastern Study Weekend: October, Pittsburgh

Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012