Two Gardeners: Katharine S.White and Elizabeth Lawrence - A Friendship in Letters - Tapa dura

The story of an unexpected friendship between two remarkable women- New Yorker editor Katharine White and southern garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence. On March 1, 1958, Katharine White published her first garden column in The New Yorker under the title "Onward and Upward in the Garden." Soon after, a reader from Charlotte, North Carolina, Elizabeth Lawrence, wrote her a fan letter filled with suggestions and encouragement. When White wrote back her appreciation, she also reported on her Maine garden and discussed the plants and books that interested her. Thus began a correspondence between the women that would last for almost two decades, the last letter written within weeks of Katharine's death in 1977.

Two Gardeners is a collection of these luminous letters, edited and introduced by Emily Herring Wilson. The letters record the flowering of a friendship between these intelligent women, both avid gardeners, and readers, both at a stage of life when to make a new friend was rare indeed: when they first wrote to one another, Katharine was sixty-two, Elizabeth, fifty-four.

Two Gardeners brings this unique epistolary friendship to life. Illustrated with photographs of both women, their families, gardens, and houses, plus drawings of many of the plants that they wrote about, this book should be a special treat for garden enthusiasts, literature lovers, and scores of readers who delight in reading about women's friendships.

Emily Herring Wilson is a writer, lecturer, and novice gardener living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is 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 Fellow.