Courtesy of Elise Smith and the University Press of Mississippi
Elise Smith and the cover of her recent book, "Southern Women, Southern Landscapes"
For almost forty years, Elise Smith has tended her home garden in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi, a few blocks from where novelist Eudora Welty lived, wrote, and tended to her own prized camellias. A weathered picket fence surrounds the tidy corner lot of Smith’s historic 1920s home, inviting curious peeks from passersby. Here, narcissi emerge in spring, followed by iris, hellebores, phlox, verbena, and established heirloom roses. Birds gather at feeders and find refuge in the decades-old tea olive. In summer, a bullfrog forages among the water lilies growing in a flagstone-bordered pond. Like any garden, this one has a story. So, too, does its gardener.
Elise Smith grew up in northern Florida and later moved around the South, with time abroad in Amsterdam and Brussels. In the eighties, she and her husband, Steve, moved to Jackson, where they both joined the faculty at Milsaps College—he as a professor of philosophy and religious studies, she as an art historian.
Before settling in Mississippi, Smith indulged her garden fantasies by collecting and reading garden books and catalogs. “I had bought [an Old Roses] book in England, and I just spent so long looking at the pictures in that book, so desiring those plants. And I also had a book on perennials ... and I remember thinking, ‘oh, I can grow all of these plants wherever we are’—not having a sense of zones.”
Courtesy of Elise Smith
Elise Smith's Belhaven front lawn
Reality quickly sunk in when Smith tried to break ground in Mississippi’s sweltering August heat. “I couldn’t even get the shovel to make a dent.”
Undeterred, Smith brought in soil to improve the hard-packed central Mississippi clay, added a granite border to the beds, and strategically placed boulders to add interest. Over the years, the amount of grass lawn has diminished to a sliver in order to make room for the flowers. Trellises and arbors mark the entrances to garden “rooms.” Old roses, like the sprawling, pink-blooming Mrs. B.R. Cant, drape their arms across the picket fence. Smith points out a new plant addition: the camellia “Imura,” which she propagated from the Welty Garden where she volunteers as a Cereus Weeder. It’s the same flower Smith carried on her wedding day.
“I wanted to not just look at catalogs and beautiful pictures of old roses, but I wanted to read about people’s experiences making gardens.” —Elise Smith
Smith’s interest in the lives of other gardening women grew in tandem with her extensive collection of books written by late nineteenth and early twentieth century garden writers like Louise Beebe Wilder and Elizabeth Lawrence. “I wanted to not just look at catalogs and beautiful pictures of old roses, but I wanted to read about people’s experiences making gardens.”
This captivation with the stories of creative women and their gardens has culminated in the book Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Cultural Reflections on the Garden, 1870-1970 (University Press of Mississippi), published in January 2026. Her third book with friend and co-author Judith W. Page, Southern Women, Southern Landscapes delves into the lives and gardens of creative and intrepid Southern women, from Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, to garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence, to folk artist Clementine Hunter.
[Read this: "Fleur D'Eden: Jeanette Belle's roses, growing in the middle of the city" ]
When Smith and Page first began writing together, they had already been friends and co-teachers for years. Smith had arrived at Millsaps College “very, very pregnant” with her second child and Page, an English professor with kids of her own, had become an instant friend. They further bonded over their shared love of gardening.
Courtesy of Elise Smith
Elise Smith's Belhaven Garden
After both women had both earned tenure, they asked themselves: “What do we want to write?” Rather than, “What should we write?” “We’ve both done a lot on British women, and we both love to garden,” said Smith. Together, they wrote Women, Literature and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 (2011) and Women, Literature, and the Arts of the Countryside in Early Twentieth-Century England (2020), both published by Cambridge University Press. For their third book, they decided, “Let’s come home to the South.”
“I’m not a painter or a drawer. But gardening is a way of being creative. It took a while for me to recognize that what I’m doing is working with colors, working with textures, making compositions. Yeah, I am an artist.” —Elise Smith
It’s hard not to see the parallels between Smith and the women whose lives and gardens populate the pages of Southern Women, Southern Landscapes. For her chapter on nineteenth century Louisiana naturalist Caroline Dormon, Smith plunged into the archives looking for primary sources, just as Dormon once plunged into swamps looking for wild iris specimens. She discovered an extensive collection of letters between Dormon and North Carolina garden writer Elizabeth Spencer. The two gardeners only met each other twice, but they wrote to one another regularly over a span of three decades. Currently, she’s editing a volume of those letters for publication.
[Read this: "In the Longleaf's Shade: The wild and wondrous life of Caroline Dormon"]
As was the case with Dormon and many of the other women in the book, for Smith, the garden is a medium for connection. She swaps passalong plants with neighbors and lends garden books to friends. Steve, an avid biker, will often bring home interesting found objects, like a chunk of discarded industrial pipe or decorative wrought iron panels, which she then incorporates into their garden.
Courtesy of Elise Smith
Daisies, Baptisia, Peggy Martin in Elise Smith's garden
The collaboration between gardener and scavenger reminds Smith of another creative partnership she details in Southern Women, Southern Landscapes—that of poet and gardener Anne Spencer and her husband Edward, a postman who salvaged architecturally interesting pieces for their home and garden while on his rounds in Lynchburg, Virginia. “‘Ed was always picking up trash and making it look like it [could be insured by] Lloyd’s of London,’” Spencer once said in an interview.
Smith holds no delusions about what might happen to her garden one day. A garden is inherently impermanent; even a well-tended bed is subject to weather and pests. “I just figure this garden’s not going to be here ... Lawn is so much easier,” she says with a matter-of-fact shrug. But ultimately, for Smith, as for the women she writes about, gardening is a form of artistic expression, of crafting an ever-evolving refuge of beauty and tranquility, a landscape of one’s own.
“I’m not a painter or a drawer,” Smith says. “But gardening is a way of being creative. It took a while for me to recognize that what I’m doing is working with colors, working with textures, making compositions. Yeah, I am an artist.”
Find Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Cultural Reflections on the Garden, 1870–1970 at upress.state.ms.us.
