I am utterly captivated by this article about Eudora Welty's house and garden in Jackson, Mississippi (discovered via automatism). Miss Eudora, as she is known locally, was an intrepid collector of plants, risking life and limb to secure the perfect bloom:
...she spent most of her life weeding and watering with her mother, browsing through seed catalogues and bulb bulletins, trekking through the swamp with a bottle of snake-venom antidote at her hip to find specimens for archipelagos of flowerbeds and planters. When her night-blooming cereus plant (“a naked, luminous, complicated flower,” she wrote in The Golden Apples) began hinting at exposing its fragile white buds each year, Welty would throw parties that would last from dusk until dawn in its honor.
(A friend from Miami told me her family also threw an annual party to honor this exotic, ephemeral specimen, which blooms once a year for one night. I think this is one of the most romantic gestures anyone could possibly make.)
Like so many writers, Welty saw a kinship between writing and gardening - the former nurtured the latter:
Her letters to friends tracked time by what was in bloom, what plants she could see from the window of the breakfast nook. “The sight of the garden and its scent!” Welty wrote in a section she edited from One Writer’s Beginning. “If work hasn’t proved it real, it would have been hallucination; in this sense gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, young fingers in the ground, to the limit of physical exhaustion.” For Welty, gardening was the process that helped distill the imaginative jumble in her head into stories. It was in the garden, Welty wrote in her papers, that she first "set myself at a storyteller’s remove."
Her cozy, unpretentious, book-filled house reminds me of the delightfully cluttered, offhand beauty of Monk's House and Charleston House - the sort of places you'd want to read and write and daydream.
