Katharine S. White began working at The New Yorker in 1925, the year of its founding, and was an editor there for thirty-four years. Throughout and beyond those years she was also a gardener. In 1958, when her job as editor was coming to a close, White wrote the first of a series of fourteen garden pieces that appeared in The New Yorker over the next twelve years.
The poet Marianne Moore originally persuaded White that these pieces would make a fine book, but it wasn't until after her death that her husband, E.B. White, assembled them for this collection. In her reviews of garden catalogues she discovers a literary genre none had suspected existed-the editors and writers of these booklets "are as individualistic... as any Faulkner or Hemingway, and they can be just as frustrating or rewarding. They have an audience equal to the most popular novelist's and a handful of them are stylists of some note."
The reader of Onward and Upward in the Garden comes to cherish White's good humor and lively criticism as she ruminates on the merits of the most recent seed catalogues, the preferred shape of petunias, the nurturing of houseplants, trends in flower arranging, or the long history and rich literature of gardening. This new North Point edition also includes a tribute to White in the form of an afterword by Jamaica Kincaid.
These 14 pieces by Katharine White first appeared in the pages of the New Yorker and were posthumously collected by her husband, E. B. White. They are at once as formal as an English manor house garden, as sensible as the Burpee seed catalog, and twice as delightful as either.
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Wildflowers are God's gift:
There is a forward by E.B. White describing his editor, wife Katharine White. Katharine White was traditional by nature. She liked the flowers of her childhood. A neighboring estate near her house in Brookline, Massachusetts was owned by a prominent botanist named Sargent who founded the Arboretum in Boston. The children of the neighborhood were permitted to trespass and she claims that her sense of what was appropriate in terms of landscaping was formed at that time.
Did you ever wonder where Charlotte the spider lived? I can visualize Mrs. White working away in one of her gardens, E.B. reclining on a lawn chair. He dozes off, and when he wakes finds a lovely garden spider has spun it's web exactly over his head. "Charlotte" he exclaims!
Mrs. White's articles were written several decades ago, and they reflect an era many cannot recall. (The median age of the U.S. population is about 30 so most residents were born after she wrote many of these articles.)
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