Fifh Annual Garden Symposium sponsored by the Old City Cemetery Museums & Arboretum, a Virginia Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places in Lynchburg, Virginia

Wednesday, March 21, 2012
3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

All events take place at:

Randolph College
The Wimberly Recital Hall, Presser Hall
2500 Rivermont Avenue
Lynchburg, VA 24503

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, One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place, 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.

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.”

On Wednesday, March 21^st at 3:00 p.m., come hear Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown speak about Miss Welty’s garden and their journey that led to the completion of One Writer’s Garden.

3:00 – 3:15 – Welcome and Introduction

3:15 – 3:55 – Susan Haltom presents, “Eudora Welty and the Gift of Flowers”                              
Near the end of her life, Welty recounted her memories of the lost garden to Haltom, a local garden designer, who helped bring it back. When Welty died in 2001, a restoration of the garden was well underway—and with it, the untold story of the garden’s place in the writer’s artistic life. Woven throughout this fascinating story are passages from Welty’s unpublished writing as well as excerpts from her personal letters.

4:00 – 4:40 – Jane Roy Brown presents, “A Grand Teacher: Women and Gardening and the Progressive Era”
The story of One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place unfolds during the rise of American home gardening in the 1920s, when women viewed it as a means of self-improvement. The lecture by coauthor Jane Roy Brown sets the garden of writer Eudora Welty in the context of garden-making in the early twentieth century, discussing the “new” suburban garden of the 1920s, Progressive-era woman’s clubs, and the rise of garden clubs.

4:45 – 6:00 – Question and Answer, Cocktail Reception, Book Signing, and Plant Sale.

Susan Haltom

Jane Roy Brown is a landscape historian and an award-winning travel and garden writer who focuses on historic gardens and landscapes. She has published in Horticulture, Preservation, Garden Design, Landscape Architecture, and other publications. Brown serves as director of educational outreach at the Library of American Landscape History.

$35 per person, includes cocktail reception

Questions or more information: dawn@gravegarden.org