Our first project was the replacement of the trellises which had defined the original garden spaces but had vanished by Welty’s death in 2001. When Eudora Welty bequeathed her house and garden to the state of Mississippi, she said, “Please do not make them into something they were not.” With the inexhaustible help of Susan Haltom, who talked extensively to Welty about her garden, we were able to restore it to what it was during the prime of Welty’s life there. Welty without her garden? Faulkner without his “woods”? Unimaginable. In them, there is a wondrous sense of place-from an entire landscape to a single leaf.
Nature and “the land” are vitally important themes in their works. However, we also believe that their work would not have been so uniquely great and unmistakably “theirs” without their intense personal responsiveness to their natural environments. We believe that both writers created great literature. They also instilled in me and, subsequently, Evelyn a deep appreciation of the natural world of Mississippi. Both writers’ work immersed me in an often familiar yet often strange land about which they were profoundly knowledgeable. Not only did LALH inspire us to bring these landscapes back to health but it also guided us in many ways with these restorations.Īs a Mississippian, I first read Welty, then Faulkner. They are the garden of Eudora Welty’s home in Jackson and the landscape surrounding William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Rowan Oak. What my wife, Evelyn, and I never expected was to be inspired by LALH to aid two important landscapes in our home state, Mississippi. When I joined the board of the Library of American Landscape History sixteen years ago, I fully expected to learn much. Southern Authors and Their Home Places: The Eudora Welty Garden and Rowan Oak Mississippi Eudora Welty in her garden.
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