Reflections

Eudora Welty grew up in an era when gardens were taken seriously, seen as an escape from the increasingly busy world and thought to prevent nervous breakdowns, so it’s not surprising that both Welty’s fiction and letters are full of references to flowers. This gorgeous book is packed with color photographs of the garden Welty helped restore before her death in 2001, a garden that had originally been tended by her mother, but flowers are not the sole focus of One Writer’s Garden. While tracing the role of gardening in the lives of Welty and her mother authors Haltom and Brown also deliver an interesting angle on the social history of the early 1900’s. Women’s garden clubs were flourishing then with greenery seen as the cure for all of society’s ills. Even during the height of the depression garden clubs were still multiplying and their members were busy planting trees along city streets and flowers in gas stations. One Writer’s Garden is full of fascinating anecdotes of a time when magenta was not well thought of because, being the color of arsenic used in pesticides, it represented pollution in the minds of the purist gardening club women. Planting magenta flowers was actively discouraged then, and Eudora Welty’s mother preferred to avoid walking down streets with that color in its gardens.