Jane Roy Brown discusses One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place

The story of an iconic American writer and her passionate connection to her home garden, set against the extraordinary events of the early twentieth century. Richly illustrated with archival photos and recent images of the restored gardens.

Eudora Welty's Mississippi garden ran riot with the camellias, roses, and daylilies that she tended as zealously as her prose. The novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for "The Optimist's Daughter," cultivated characters for her stories - along with the flowers that she grew - in her modest Jackson garden.

A fine new book by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown looks at Welty's enduring relationship with her garden, to which she turned as a respite from her travels and the pressures of making a living as a writer. The garden and house where Eudora Welty (1909-2001) lived and wrote is now a museum, and the garden has been restored to its heyday in the 1920s through the '40s.

Eudora watering the garden courtesy Eudora Welty LLC.

Welty's letters, published for the first time in this book, reveal witty and telling observations about not only gardening, but also fellow gardeners. She wrote to a friend, "The delphiniums I planted in my ignorance have all bloomed like everything and are getting ready to bloom for the second time and Mother says the ladies of the garden club come over each day to worship and grit their teeth."

Come hear Jane Roy Brown speak about "Miss Welty's" garden and how its formation also offers a compelling look at the broader social trends of the time, including the flourishing of women's civic involvement through garden clubs and the development of streetcar suburbs. Brown serves as director of educational outreach at the Library of American Landscape History. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe as well as in national publications.

Admission to the book talk is free but an RSVP is requested to Maureen Horn, Mass Hort Librarian, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or by calling 617-933-4912. The event is co-sponsored by COGdesign (www.cogdesign.org) and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (www.masshort.org).

About the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's Library

Creating a practical library was a top priority for the founding members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1829. Today, the 20,000-volume library is a testament to their vision and a symbol of the Society's steadfast role as a champion for horticultural in America.

Housed at the historic Elm Bank estate in Wellesley, the library is at the heart of Mass Hort. With more than 40,000 items spanning three centuries, including numerous rare editions, the collection of books, periodicals, and illustrations encapsulates the development of American horticulture. The exquisitely illustrated seed and nursery catalogs along provide critical historical insight for botanical research. More than just a repository, Mass Hort's library is an archive of the science of horticulture, and a showcase for scholarship in the field.

We welcome visitors, researchers, scholars, and authors to browse through the stacks at our library.