a Shared garden

my mother came with me to Jackson. For years, she had witnessed my fascination with Sister, Phoenix, the Renfros, and countless other perfectly drawn characters pulled from the Mississippi air by Eudora Welty, one of the greatest American writers. There we sat, in a tiny room on the third floor of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, reading, not Eudora's writing, but that of her mother, Chestina.

A Gardener's Vision

Chestina Welty's garden journal is one of many treasures now carefully tended by the archives staff. Though it is not yet available to researchers, thousands of pages of Eudora's letters, stories, and other documents are. Together with the family home on Jackson's Pinehurst Street, they were Eudora's gift to her native state.

Wearing gloves to protect Chestina's journal, I carefully turn the pages as Mother reads each entry over my shoulder. Don't think of it as a flowerbed but as furnishing a border for your garden....Never cut an oak tree.

A Garden Reborn

Chestina's words of wisdom are all the more intriguing after taking a stroll through her garden. Now restored, it opened in 2004 for tours (which take place on Wednesdays from March through October). "We want this to be a teaching garden," says garden restoration consultant Susan Haltom. "Chestina kept meticulous records, and Eudora took photographs-all of which have helped us restore the garden. We are striving to keep the spirit of the place and to help visitors feel as if they've stepped into the Welty garden. So you'll see lots of roses-Chestina's favorite-as well as irises, camellias, daylilies, and many other beautiful plants."

From Mother to Daughter

I wanted to share the story of this garden with my mother because I had seen something familiar in the Welty women-so different yet so connected. I can imagine Chestina shaking her head as a young Eudora, too preoccupied with writing to focus on domestic arts, bounded down the stairs to catch a train for New York. And I think of my own mother saying with a sigh, "You can't be my child."

Just as we did, Chestina and Eudora found common ground in the garden. Eudora used to joke, "I was my mother's yard boy." However, the many gardening references in her fiction suggest that she developed, under her mother's tutelage, a formidable plant knowledge of her own.

Both women loved the garden they tended side by side, though they entered it through different gates. Chestina studied seed catalogs, drew meticulous plans, and approached gardening as she approached everything in life-with purpose. Eudora, ever the artist, was as intrigued with the mystery and beauty of flowers as she was by the practicalities of growing them.

That gardener's wonder weaves throughout her fiction like a morning glory vine; she dotted the landscape of her stories with montbretias, lemon daylilies, hyacinths, dogwoods, cypresses, mimosas, and so much more.

One Writer's Home

Besides touring the garden, Welty fans will soon be able to step inside the house where she wrote those marvelous stories. Following a major restoration (scheduled for completion in 2006), visitors will be able to stand in the upstairs bedroom where Eudora wrote. There, from an unassuming desk, she gazed out three large windows and saw, not just the street below, but the dignity and meaning in the lives of ordinary people.

As staff members carefully pack her belongings for storage during the restoration, Eudora's niece and Eudora Welty House director Mary Alice White invites me to ramble through this welcoming old Tudor. Books are everywhere. The small volumes of a Dickens collection are still smeared with the Mississippi earth that cushioned their fall when Chestina hurled them out the window to save them from a house fire long ago.

I quiz Mary Alice and learn, to my delight, that my literary heroine was a warm, kind, mischievously funny human being.

Not surprisingly, Mary Alice holds fond memories of the garden and Eudora's connection to it. When the writer was in her thirties, Mary Alice tells me, she and some of her Jackson friends formed the Night-Blooming Cereus Club, whose mission was sheer enjoyment-gathering to celebrate the annual one-night-only bloom of this exotic flower.

The club's motto might not have suited the more analytical Chestina, but it surely would have made her smile because it was so typical of her imaginative daughter. As Eudora and friends proclaimed, "Don't make it cereus-life's too mysterious."

To schedule a tour call [phone], or e-mail [e-mail]. To contribute to restoration efforts, visit www.eudorawelty.org.

© 2005 Southern Progress Corporation Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.