About the Author:
Emily Herring Wilson is a writer, lecturer, and novice gardener living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The author of Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South and coauthor of North Carolina Women: Making History, she has taught at Wake Forest University, Salem College, and Cornell University and is a MacDowell Colony Fellow.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
I
"A Romp in the Catalogues"
1958–1961
For gardeners, this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of
thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogues, making lists
for their seed and plant orders, and dreaming their dreams.
—"A Romp in the Catalogues," The New Yorker, K.S.W
Katharine White"s review of garden catalogues, published in The
New Yorker on March 1, 1958, apparently was the first review of its kind, and
it was an immediate success. Some readers wrote to ask the name of the
writer, identified only as K.S.W. (Someone with a near-perfect memory might
have realized that "K.S.W." was "K.S.A.," who had written light verse about
the "Seductive Spring Seed Catalogue" in a March 1926 New Yorker, when
she was Katharine S. Angell and a new staff member.) One reader who did
know the identity of the writer was Elizabeth Lawrence, a lifelong reader of
The New Yorker. Her fan letter to Katharine a month or so after the
appearance of the review is the first letter in the following section.
After a dozen letters between "Mrs. White" and "Miss Lawrence,"
Katharine and Elizabeth settled into a first-name basis. Elizabeth kept up a
steady flow of information on nurseries and garden books and thus called
forth Katharine"s repeated expressions of appreciation and more questions.
Elizabeth clearly enjoyed researching any topics that were introduced, and
she was glad to have Katharine"s records of bloom dates in Maine. For more
than three decades Eizabeth had been making notes on index cards about
what was going on in her garden—and in the gardens of others. The
unexpected availability of such a fine compatriot as Elizabeth must have
confirmed the rightness of Katharine"s decision to follow her first review with a
series of pieces, to be presented each time under the title "Onward and
Upward in the Garden." She hoped to publish them twice a year, and in 1959
and 1960 she succeeded. In March 1960 she received a letter from the
publisher Alfred Knopf, proposing that she write a book, an idea that she told
him she would "ponder."
The letters going back and forth between Charlotte, North
Carolina, and North Brooklin, Maine (and New York City and Sarasota,
Florida, when the Whites traveled) were hardy perennials. Feelings began to
jostle alongside facts as the two women exchanged anecdotes and kept up
one another"s spirits. By early spring 1961, Katharine—who had insisted that
she was an editor, not a writer—had published some 100 pages of her garden
pieces in The New Yorker. She began to enjoy including some of her own
memories in her discussions of flowers, recalling happy summers as a child
when she and her sister picked water lilies on Lake Chocorua in New
Hampshire.
Elizabeth, for her part, was also publishing her gardening column
every Sunday in the Charlotte Observer. Although she worked on two or three
book manuscripts at a time, the newspaper column gave her the greatest
pleasure, always producing a flurry of letters. "I wish you lived next door,"
Elizabeth wrote to Katharine, "I would fill your garden up."
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