Susan Haltom has written about restoring an historic garden, that of author Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi. Haltom had the advantage of knowing her subject’s creator over the last few years of her life, learning that Welty did not want the garden to be “pretentious, inappropriate, or filled with plants chosen for showiness.”
The resulting book, “One Writer’s Garden,” co-written with Jane Roy Brown, is primarily an engaging biography of this 20th century master of novels and short stories set in the American south. Many of her stories have garden or gardening themes, likely inspired by the family garden. The final chapter not only recaps the restoration process, but also brings to light the gardening practices and customs of the garden’s heyday in the 1920s through 1940s.
Excerpted from the Fall 2016 Arboretum Bulletin.