Standing straight and tall, the two rows of red cedars that line the brick path to William Faulkner’s former home Rowan Oak in Oxford have become as emblematic of the author’s life as the scrawled words on the walls within the house itself. In Jackson, the gardens surrounding the former home of fellow writer Eudora Welty are just as known for their distinctive specimens, including colorful camellias first grown by her mother.
The preservation of both of these natural works of art long after each author’s death were among the projects supported by Evelyn and the late Michael Jefcoat of Laurel. A past president of the Library of American Landscape History, Michael also served as a trustee of the Eudora Welty Foundation, and the couple poured their knowledge and resources into the revitalization of both the Welty house and garden and the grounds of Rowan Oak. The couple also established college forestry scholarships in the state, and in 2023, they received a historic preservation commendation from the Garden Club of America in recognition of their “vision, leadership, and generosity.”
The Jefcoats maintained an equally close connection to the natural environment at their own homeplace in Laurel. The grounds were mostly overgrown when they purchased the property and its Italianate-style residence in 1995, but they recognized the potential of both. The home had been built in 1929 with a design by renowned Meridian architect P.J. Krouse, who also designed courthouses, churches, and schools in several Mississippi counties.
The Jefcoats hired Hattiesburg landscape architect Edward Blake Jr. to create a design that would bring their property back to life. It was a daunting task, as they were told that the backyard area had been previously tended in a cycle that included allowing everything to grow for about a decade, bush hogging everything, then starting the process all over again. The Jefcoats’ vision included structured garden spaces, with an emphasis on form over flowers.
Around the same time, Michael became fascinated with all things landscape design. His subjects included gardens in the United States, Europe, and Japan. “When he became interested in something, he would start studying it as if he were going to teach it,” Evelyn says. “He loved learning.”
As his knowledge of gardens grew, Michael set about redesigning the Jefcoats’ gardens “two or three times” over the years, Evelyn says. Meanwhile, the Jefcoats got involved with supporting the restoration of the home and garden of Eudora Welty, whose work Michael had read avidly since he was a boy. “We became particularly interested in the landscape of the house,” Evelyn says. The initiative to bring the Welty home’s surroundings back to peak condition—but, as Welty had asked, “not make them into something they were not”—included replacing trellises, rebuilding a garden clubhouse, and reintroducing plants that were included in Welty’s mother’s original garden designs. The Jefcoats also later helped to produce the 2011 book One Writer’s Garden, authored by Welty garden restoration project leader Susan Haltom and writer Jane Roy Brown.
The Jefcoats also stepped up to help advise and underwrite the restoration of portions of the property surrounding Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. Their patronage saw a historic gazebo reconstructed and a sunken garden re-excavated. And as with the Welty garden, the couple helped to create a book that would commemorate this distinctive landscape, Ed Croom’s The Land of Rowan Oak.
“We believe that both writers created great literature,” Michael wrote in a 2017 article for the Library of American Landscape History’s magazine View. “However, we also believe that their work would not have been so uniquely great and unmistakably ‘theirs’ without their intense personal responsiveness to their natural environments. Nature and ‘the land’ are vitally important themes of their work. In them, there is a wondrous sense of place… Welty without her garden? Faulkner without his ‘woods’? Unimaginable.”
That sense of place was something Michael also brought to the Jefcoats’ own landscape, which would go on to receive acclaim when it was added to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Gardens. But his deep research allowed him to incorporate unique details like spaces inspired by the Villa d’Este Tivoli in Italy, along with late 18th- and early 19th-century French and English gardens, according to the Smithsonian.
And then there are the hidden garden rooms, such as one inspired by the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi that encourages people to seek beauty in simplicity and imperfection. Another is a French-inspired “ruin garden,” filled with salvaged pieces that look like they’ve been here forever. A maze-like area features 12-foot-tall boxwood hedges around winding brick paths.
The Jefcoats got creative when it came to installing water features as well. A horse watering trough that came from the Ellisville courthouse is now on the couple’s terrace, while a collection of farm feeding and watering troughs were made into fountains and used as garden art.
Within the gardens, Michael combined his love of studying and design when he converted a former servant house into what he called his “book house” by stuccoing the exterior walls, adding a terrace, and outfitting the inside for reading. “Every wall literally has books from floor to ceiling,” Evelyn says.
After Hurricane Katrina felled several tall trees that had served as a privacy screen for the property, the Jefcoats added new hedges and masses of tall shrubs including Mary Nell hollies that now stretch up to 35 feet high. “The Mary Nell holly makes a great fence, and it’s evergreen and grows like crazy in this climate,” Evelyn says. “So it’s an excellent choice for privacy.”
Hunter McLeod is as familiar with those tall hollies as anyone, having first helped to maintain this property more than 20 years ago when he was a student working for a landscape contracting firm in Laurel. McLeod came full circle in 2021 when his own firm, Four Seasons Lawn and Landscape, assumed responsibility for finetuning and maintaining the Jefcoats’ landscape.
“Michael didn’t want the typical annual color and lots of flowers,” McLeod reflects. “You won’t find a bunch of crape myrtles and azaleas here; they focused on evergreens and created a really unique landscape.”
McLeod and his team initially focused on addressing some diseased plants on the property, as well as thinning out areas that had been planted tightly. His next focus is on trimming back some large plants to help them flush out in a healthy way. “It’s a pleasure to work on this property with all of the details in the design,” he says. “When you’re here, there’s a feeling like you’re in a totally different place.”
Even with inspiration coming from far afield, it’s clear that this landscape is as true to Mississippi as the ones that surrounded Eudora Welty and William Faulkner during their lives. And like those works, it bestows its own inspiration upon those who come upon it. After all, as Welty once wrote, “Gardening is akin to writing stories.”
