Most camellias here have almost completely finished their blooming and I’ve been thinking of Miss Eudora so often when seeing them. Southern Living posted in January about a letter she wrote to Diarmuid Russell, published in Julia Eichelberger’s Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949 (here at Amazon, here at Bookshop). She penned about dreaming of “all the billions of camellias in the world” and how they were condensed to millions, then hundreds, and then to one, the original.
At the end of the dream, she said there was a sound, like that of a jewelry box closing. And that was that.
This is how people were before texting. She writes Russell about camellias and he’s writing her about Solomon’s Seal (fellow garden friends: I don’t have any, but sounds like it is fond of shade and you can put it where you’d think of for hostas).
Eudora’s mother would wrap camellia blooms from home in wet cotton and send them via express train from Jackson to her in NYC. Later when Eudora was living in Jackson, she would be the one sending camellia blossoms to her literary agent up there.
One book about Eudora Welty and and flowers is One Writer’s Garden : Eudora Welty’s Home Place (here at Amazon, here at Bookshop). She had the Night-Blooming Cereus Club (can you imagine the phone tree to let each other know it’s close to blooming, since it’s just for one night at a time?). Also among her friends was a really interesting bunch of writers: Frank Lyell, Hubert Creekmore, and Nash Burger, plus Lehman Engel who won five or six Tony awards.
(Tangent time:) Lehman Engel had an incredible, incredible career beyond what earned him Tonys. BMI has to this day a Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. He’s related to the Orkins who owned the Alamo and Capri Theaters in Jackson. Engel died in NYC and is buried at Jackson’s Beth Israel cemetery with his family.
Now, Eudora had a salon going on. For laughs, her friends would dress up in the fashion of Vanity Fair features and take pictures of one another, like this pic used as the cover of To Absent Friends.
After seeing the cereus on the side porch of her home, I decided I needed one. In fact, I got one for me and one for Anne and for some reason I just keep forgetting to give her the other one, even though it’s been a year.
The crazy crazy crazy part is that I actually found these online and the person selling it wouldn’t give me her address until I was in the city limits. So I drive up there at the appointed time, message her that I’m indeed in the city limits, there’s no answer. She was napping (she’s older). Then I’m thinking I’m just going home, it’s nuts, and by the time I get in the next county she’s messaging, apologizing for the snooze. So I run back and get two and in the process realize that I used to be related to her by marriage (not mine, ha) but that was such a not-great story/outcome that I decide to keep that little nugget to myself.
I’ve managed to keep both cereus’ alive and they look…happy I guess but this is not the most gorgeous plant in the universe. No matter, when it’s bloom time, people will know!
Above, the cereus on the porch at the Welty home / museum, from my visit in 2023
Magnolia, the newsletter of the Publication of the Southern Garden History Society, had a feature last year about the cereus, including that mention of the cereus was as early as the 1820s in Mississippi newspapers. They say, “This tradition, of course, is the part-social, parthorticultural phenomenon in which proud cereus growers would announce an imminent bloom in the newspaper, often in the form of an open invitation for friend and stranger alike to converge on their porch to witness the spectacle late at night. (It is not uncommon for cereus flowers to start blooming around 10 p.m. or later.)”
Welty wrote in 1943: “A nightblooming cereus opened down the street and had three flowers—we went to see it and looked at it with matches.”
When Googling the cereus, I found this at the Linnean Society of London about Isabel Wilkerson’s grandmother:
Once a year on a midsummer night that could not be foretold, a curious plant called the night-blooming cereus would decide to undrape its petals…
“My night-blooming cereus is going to open tonight,” she told them.
[The neighbours] would arrive at my grandmother’s front porch around midnight.
They rocked in the porch swing and waited…
The opening took hours. Sometime around three in the morning, the white petals began to open, and the women set down their sweet tea to crane their necks over the blossom. They inhaled its sugary scent and tried to find the baby Jesus in the cradle in the folds.
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