Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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I was enthralled and deeply moved by this book. Enthralled, because reading their letters was akin to reading modern day garden blogs. I was deeply moved by their deaths because I felt by the end of the book that I knew them.

Their letters also brought back a lot of memories for me. My maternal grandmother was a few years older than Katharine White. Unlike many women of her time, she married late in life and had my mother when she was close to 40. When I knew her, she had retired and was living in an apartment. I loved accompanying her when she went "visiting". Part of those visits involved tours of her friends' gardens. Gardens that looked very much like the photos and descriptions of Katharine's and Elizabeth's gardens. Their letters sounded eerily like the conversations during those visits.

The descriptions of the flower shows made me laugh! I remember shows like those derided in their letters. My poor mother tried and tried to learn flower arranging. Books, classes, garden club lectures, nothing helped. She finally settled on just entering specimen plants and flowers. I should add that she won several prizes in local shows. And that I inherited her inability to arrange flowers in an attractive manner.

From what I could tell in their letters, Katharine White and Elizabeth Lawrence only met in person once. Their correspondence allowed them to know one another in such a different manner. The differences between a "Southern" and "Northern" gardener were trivial in so many ways. And yet, their friendship let each woman grow in gardening knowledge.

I picked the book up because I've visited Blue Hill, Maine and have always loved E.B. White's work. Now I'm going looking for more of Katharine and Elizabeth.

I am an avid gardener,this book shows the passion gardeners have,I also gained insight on how I might improve my own garden.

I am reading "TWO GARDENERS A Friendship in Letters". It is letters between two ladies that wrote to one another over a period of 20 years. 1958 to 1977. In 1958, Elizabeth L was 62 and the Katharine W 54. I don't want the book to end. I am glad to own this book, purchased for one penny from Amazon!

Their gardening letters remind me of my gardening friends and my emails and our

love for learning and trying different plants. In the book, different books were suggested so I have ordered several through Amazon...they were just one penny and 3.99 postage.

The latest is The Fragrant Path by Louise Beebe Wilder.It was written in 1930 and I am loving it. Very informative about fragrant flowers. It reads

like a novel. It is over 400 pages and amazing how much information before

the age of the Internet!

I also love how these two ladies in TWO GARDENERS write.For instance, one of the women said the hybrid roses that do not have fragrance are like 'a rose without it's soul'.

When Ms Lawrence's elderly mother died, Mrs White wrote and said: "It is a bad feeling to find there is no longer an older generation behind us."

And for us that are getting up there in years, this gives us something to ponder when WE are the older generation!