Eudora Welty’s Garden
The plot for Eudora Welty’s most autobiographical novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, unfolds after the family patriarch, Judge McKelva, prunes a rose heavy with memories in his rambling garden. The rose, called Becky’s Climber in the book, comes straight out of Welty’s garden in Jackson, Mississippi.
By Jeannette Hardy
The plot for Eudora Welty's most autobiographical novel, The Optimist's Daughter, unfolds after the family patriarch, Judge McKelva, prunes a rose heavy with memories in his rambling garden. The rose, called Becky's Climber in the book, comes straight out of Welty's garden in Jackson, Mississippi. When I visited the garden that surrounds her Tudor-style house, I was astonished to see the inspiration for Becky's Climber arrayed along a fence, its dangling canes returning me to the pages of The Optimist's Daughter, which I'd read a year or so earlier. That rose was just the beginning of connections I saw between the evocative southern plants in Welty's garden and the ones she relied on to establish a sense of place in her books.
If you go to the garden on Pinehurst Street, which opened to the public last April, brace yourself for a primer on the native and heirloom plants that dominate Mississippi's landscape. There are camellias of every stripe, banana shrub (Michelia fuscata), and other fragrant plants, along with bulbs galore
