Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden-and the friends who remembered it-had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called "my mother's garden." By the time Eudora died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden.

The Writer's Garden presents an intriguing study of the beautiful gardens and outdoor spaces of 30 history's greatest writers.

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden—and the friends who remembered it—had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mother's garden.” By the time Welty died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history—and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century—with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.

From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time."

No One Gardens Alone tells for the first time the story of Elizabeth Lawrence (1904-1985). Like classic biographies of Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, this fascinating book reveals Lawrence in all her complexity and establishes her, at last, as one of the premier gardeners and gardening writers of the twentieth century. "In this first biography of the renowned gardening writer Elizabeth Lawrence, Emily Herring Wilson reminds us that even quiet lives hold unsuspected passions. Written with graceful clarity, sensitivity, and empathy, this life is a perennial."--Linda H. Davis, author of Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White Elizabeth Lawrence (1904-1985) lived a singular, often contradictory life. She was a traditional southerner; a successful, independent garden writer with her own newspaper column and numerous books to her credit; a dutiful daughter who cared for her elders and lived with her mother; a landscape architect; a passionate poet; a friend of literary figures like Eudora Welty and Joseph Mitchell; and a very private woman whose recently discovered letters illuminate aspects of her mystery. Lawrence earned many fans during her lifetime and gained even more after her death with the reissue of many of her classic books. When Emily Herring Wilson edited a collection of letters between Lawrence and famed New Yorker editor Katharine S. White in Two Gardeners, she found legions of readers who were eager to know more about the legendary Lawrence. Now, one hundred years after her birth, No One Gardens Alone tells for the first time the story of this fascinating woman. Like classic biographies of literary figures such as Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, this book reveals Lawrence in all her complexity and establishes her, at last, as one of the premier gardeners and garden writers of the twentieth century.

Show me a person without any prejudice of any kind on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably virtuous but is surely no gardener.--Allen Lacy. Idiosyncratic, determined, and occasionally obsessed, gardeners have a lot to say about their outdoor passion. THE WRITER IN THE GARDEN brings together a host of writing gardeners and gardening writers reveling in their quirks, confessing their shortcomings, and sharing their experiences. Combing through a hundred years of garden writing, editor Jane Garmey has discovered some great contemporary works and rediscovered many classics: "I am strongly of the opinion," declares Gertrude Jekyll, "that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden." "It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged," writes Vita Sackville-West. "Gardeners are--let's face it--control freaks," Abby Adams admits. "Who else would willingly spend his leisure hours wrestling weeds out of the ground, blithely making life or death decisions about living beings, moving earth from here to there, changing the course of waterways?" Drawing on the work of more than fifty writers, THE WRITER IN THE GARDEN covers subjects ranging from the beauty of the garden to ornery weeds, the hazards of rare plant collecting, and the tribulations of inclement weather. The collection includes a range of authors from both sides of the Atlantic: from Edith Wharton, who insists that we could all learn a thing or two about design from the Italians, to Stephen Lacey, who reveals that his most exciting gardening moments are spent in the bath. Some of the other writers in the collection are: E. B. White, Beverly Nichols, Ken Druse, Eleanor Perenyi, W. S. Merwin, Mirabel Osler, Henry Mitchell, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Dash, Sara B. Stein, Michael Pollan, M.F.K. Fisher, Anne Raver, Patti Hagan, Paula Deitz.

Great things happen in gardens. No one can doubt the importance of the garden in Roald Dahl's life as it was here where he worked, and here that he created James and the Giant Peach. And where would Jane Austen have been if she had never seen a 'walk', an ornamental lake, or a wilderness? Gardens hold a special place in many author's lives. For Beatrix Potter, Hill Top house was made possible by the new found freedom and wealth that a literary career can bring; for Sir Walter Scott, laying out his garden at Abbotsford was a way of distracting himself from mounting debts. In this book of 18 gardens and 20 writers, the author examines how the poet, writer, novelist derived a creative spirit from their private garden, how they tended and enjoyed their gardens, and how they managed their outdoor space. Jane Austen at Godmersham and Chawton Rupert Brooke at Grantchester John Ruskin at Brantwood Agatha Christie at Greenway Beatrix Potter at Hill Top Roald Dahl at Gipsy House Charles Dickens at Gad's Hill Place Virginia Woolf at Monk's House Winston Churchill at Chartwell Laurence Sterne at Shandy Hall George Bernard Shaw at Shaw's Corner Ted Hughes at Lumb Bank Henry James followed by E.F. Benson at Lamb House John Clare at Helpston Thomas Hardy at Hardy's Cottage and Max Gate Robert Burns at Ellisland William Wordsworth at Cockermouth and Grasmere Walter Scott at Abbotsford Rudyard Kipling at Bateman's