by Katharine S. White & Elizabeth Lawrence (edited by Emily Herring Wilson)

A legendary editor at The New Yorker during its first thirty-four years, Katharine S. White was also a great garden enthusiast. In March 1958 she began publishing her popular column, “Onward and Upward in the Garden.” Her first column elicited loads of fan mail, but one letter in particular caught her attention. From Elizabeth Lawrence, a noted Southern garden writer, it was filled with suggestions and encouragement. Thus began a correspondence that would last for almost twenty years, until Katharine’s death in 1977.

Two Gardeners is an engaging collection of these luminous letters, edited and introduced by Emily Herring Wilson. The letters bring to life the unique epistolary friendship between two intelligent women, the “formidable” Mrs. White and the “shy” Miss Lawrence, 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.