JACKSON, Miss. — For many gardeners, visiting unique and historic landscapes is part of the joy of cultivating their own. Just a three-hour drive from Shreveport, the Eudora Welty House and Garden in Jackson, Miss., offers that kind of inspiration.
Gardens surrounding the Jackson house of Eudora Welty.
Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the first living writer to be published by the Library of America, spent 76 years in the Jackson home where she created both her literary and horticultural legacies. While she wrote masterful short stories and novels in her upstairs room overlooking the neighborhood and nearby Belhaven University, she and her mother also cultivated gardens that remain a highlight of her estate today.
Her love of gardening mirrored her writing — rooted in Southern tradition yet alive with vivid detail. Welty collected camellias and azaleas from her travels, grew roses rarely seen since the mid-20th century, and often wove the imagery of flowers into her fiction, such as in her novel Delta Wedding and The Optimist’s Daughter.
Spring was her favorite season in the garden, according to those who helped to preserve the grounds. But even in late summer, with zinnias, daylilies, and coreopsis, the colors lent the garden a special glow.
The late Eudora Welty in a televised interview in 1971.
Her niece, Mary Alice Welty White, read from her aunt’s letters in an audio tour recording.
“Our garden was a succession of bloom. It was changing and renewing itself every month of the year. It drew me in to it too,” she said.
The Eudora Welty House, where the celebrated author lived until her death in 2001, is now a historic site open to the public. The gardens are free to tour and open from dawn to dusk on days when the house museum is open.
Located just off I-20 in Jackson — about 220 miles east of Shreveport—the home and gardens offer a chance to walk in the footsteps of one of America’s great literary voices while enjoying the blooms she so lovingly tended.
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