The Eudora Welty House Garden at 119 Pinehurst Street, Jackson, Mississippi is a southern garden created by two educated women, Chestina and Eudora Welty, in the middle of the 20th century. Characteristic of gardens fashioned during the period from 1925 to 1945, its ongoing restoration demonstrates current horticultural interest in vernacular gardens (those characteristic or common to a period, place, or group of people).
However, Eodora Welty, known as the "First Lady of Southern Literature," is esteemed for her fiction, usually set in the rural South, and not for her gardening. She was a 6-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Stories, and her many awards include the National Medal for Literature, the American Book Award, and, in 1969, a Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter.
Scholars attribute the garden with stimulating a good portion of Welty's writing. Gardening and photography - Welty was also an accomplished and published photographer - sharpened her powers of observation. The house and garden at Pinehurst Street is where Welty lived and wrote for seventy-five years. And, it is for these elements that admirers of Welty's writing seek out and investigate the garden.
Welty's work abounds with passages such as the following from the short story, "Kim."
Welty's mother, Chestina, essentially created the garden and Eudora referred to herself as her mother's "yard boy." Nevertheless, she created a record by photographing the gardens in the 1930's from the house roof. The garden stretches over a city lot of about three-quarters of an acre. It is neither fancy nor big by contemporary standards of other gardens. Following fashion of the time, trellises, hedges and borders divide the garden into rooms making the whole seem large.
Favorite plants were daylilies, camellias and roses. And as restoration began in the mid-1990s, workers discovered remnants of these plants. Currently, forty-one camellia shrubs remain in the garden, some of them grafted by Eudora herself. Chestina's plans and Eudora's photographs helped as garden historians searched for additional plants contemporary with the mid-20th century.
More than thirteen hundred people toured the garden of the Eudora Welty House during "A Garden Reborn," the three-day opening celebration April 3-5, 2004. Visitors from twenty-six states, the District of Columbia, and Canada traveled to Jackson for the event. The garden is currently open for free tours to the public on Wednesdays from March 1 through October 31, 10 a. m. to 2 p. m. However, to reserve a time please call the Eudora Welty House at (601) 353-7762 or email weltytours@mdah.state.ms.us
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