Here, Eudora Welty writes to Diarmuid Russell, her close friend and literary agent, about winter in Jackson, Mississippi.
Dear Diarmuid,
Snow today—and nobody sorrier than the fig trees. If you could see the camellia bushes in the yards your heart would go out to them for the indignities they are suffering—just as they were prepared to shine forth all in bloom people have run out and covered them from top to bottom—just in anything—stakes are driven round them and then carpeting, dishpans, curtains, flowered cretonne, blankets and old sheets are put on them. They will be alright I guess and someday will be uncovered but now some of them look like Egyptian mummies and some like ballet dancers on skinny legs and some like ducks with little tails sticking out and some like whole assemblies of matched ghosts, white with blue borders. There is a maniac here (really a surgeon) with a yard full of bushes which he erects canvas tents over and heats all night by gas heaters inside, one each—an ideal place for drawing tramps, I should think, and I am a little envious of tramps that could come in out of the cold to a nice warm tent and a stove to heat coffee over and a Pink Perfection to curl up under for the evening, imagine waking up and finding that you’re in bloom.
Yours—
Eudora
From Tell about Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949. Welty, Eudora, and Julia Eichelberger. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.