Roses, Nematodes, and Literary Battles: Eudora Welty’s Garden of Stories

October 1, 1972

Dearest reader,

On this day, The Tampa Tribune turned its discerning gaze toward the incomparable Eudora Welty, that Mississippi enchantress whose pen captured the humid pulse of Southern life with humor as sly as a mockingbird’s song.

The piece revealed a glimpse—intimate, poignant, and achingly human—of Miss Welty writing her final novel, Losing Battles, within the shadowed stillness of her mother’s last illness.

They wrote that,

“Miss Welty was writing 'Losing Battles' at home with her [dying mother] and two nurses and laughing a great deal (the book is beyond grief and funny as owls in heaven), and the nurses did not approve of anything.

And right in the middle of it, the nematodes did in the roses, which had been packed in that garden tight as a trunk, but nothing that could be tried availed at all.

Ordinarily, an attack on her roses would have brought [the older] Mrs. Welty right out of the kitchen, as they say, but she was past those battles then.

Her characters in her stories are like the roses: some make it, some don't.”

Can you see it, dear reader?

A house filled with the twin fragrances of mortality and mirth—words sprouting even as blossoms withered, their creator composing laughter amidst the low hum of nurses and the rustle of rose leaves gone brittle.

What fortitude must it take to write “funny as owls in heaven” while grief taps gently at the door?

The nematodes, those invisible assassins of roots, became—perhaps unknowingly—part of the Welty mythos. They destroyed her roses, “packed tight as a trunk,” as if claiming the last possession of a household already surrendering to loss.

Yet, from that decay, Welty cultivated story. Like a gardener pruning back the spent blooms, she shaped her pain into petals of prose.

Her mother, who once would have flown “right out of the kitchen” to defend her roses, could do so no more.

But isn’t that the way of all gardens—and families?

Seasons pass; some plants persist; others yield their beauty and go.

Eudora saw this cycle clearly, refusing to avert her gaze.

“Her characters in her stories are like the roses: some make it, some don't.”

It was both her creed and her comfort.

And so, dear friends of the garden and the page, might we also ask: when the nematodes come for our roses, what will we write, or make, or tend in defiance?

Will we be content to mourn the lost blooms—or will we, like Miss Welty, laugh in the face of the worms and weave joy from sorrow?

Perhaps there is no finer act of gardening—or of living—than that.