Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012 - (Page 287)

significant period for Chestina’s garden appears to have been 1925 to 1945, thus presenting Haltom and her crew with challenges on how to present the garden based on its current condition and future use. She drew upon Chestina’s logs, plant lists, and notes, as well as Eudora’s photographs, her papers, and writings. The garden was opened to the public in 2004 and the house in 2006; the site is now a National Historic Landmark. Haltom says that when Eudora died in 2001, few people knew or understood that she had been a gardener and that her numerous references to flowers and plants in her writings grew from experience, learned first from her mother and then from her own hands-on, dirt-underthe fingernails efforts. When Haltom had several opportunities to interview Eudora in her last decade, Eudora told her “I think that people have lost the working garden. We used to get down on our hands and knees. The absolute contact between the hand and the earth, the intimacy of it, that is the instinct of a gardener.” One Writer’s Garden chronicles the garden—first Chestina’s, then Eudora’s—from its heyday to its decline and eventual rehabilitation. It is co-authored by Jane Roy Brown, a landscape historian, who focuses on historic gardens and landscapes. The book has scores of period black and white Welty family photographs, including some from Welty’s WPA work, and a collection of contemporary photos by Langdon Clay (supplemented by Haltom). In reading One Writer’s Garden, there are many places where Eudora Welty’s writings caused me to linger over a phrase and savor it. But one of Haltom’s caused me to pause as well. Haltom writes that, as Eudora watched her mother expend her grief in the garden after her father’s death in 1931, “Eudora discovered the solace of gardening for herself, and a kind of joy.” For fifteen years, I have made daily use of an email program called Eudora. The software, developed in the late 1980s by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois, pays homage to Eudora Welty’s short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.” In Dorner’s busy life, he apparently saw a connection between Welty’s “post office” and his daily e-mail fetching, naming the software “Eudora” in her honor, a reference that pleased the author. Sadly, I am being forced to give up Eudora, the e-mail software, because it, just like the post office Welty wrote about, is becoming obsolete and outdated by newer software and technological changes. Thankfully, there’s nothing outdated about Eudora, the author and gardener, especially as lovingly preserved in Haltom’s admirable book. Bobby J Ward. New book by NARGS Member Robert L. Fincham of Coenosium Gardens, Eatonville, Washington, has written Small Conifers for Small Gardens, an alphabetical listing of conifers and their cultivars from Abies concolor ‘Archer’s Dwarf’ to Tsuga mertensiana ‘Elizabeth’. The 291page book with color photos taken at gardens around the world aims to “provide new ideas about using smaller conifers in the landscape as well as provide information about which conifers are actually dwarf.” Available for $34.95 at or telephone 360-832-8655. Bookshelf 287 http://www.cnos.biz

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