Cold Climate Gardening

Have you ever been out with a friend, and another person joins you, who is a good friend of your friend, but you don’t know them? And the two of them start talking about people you don’t know, and even though the conversation is mildly interesting (this one had a baby, that one has a new job), after a while you feel bored and a little left out.

I’m sorry to say that’s how I felt reading Beautiful at All Seasons by Elizabeth Lawrence, the April/May selection of the Garden Bloggers Book Club. It kind of surprised me, as I believe I’d already read all her other books, including Two Gardeners (her correspondence with Katharine White), and No One Gardens Alone (her biography)–and enjoyed them all.

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I just finished reading Two Gardeners : Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence–A Friendship in Letters edited by Emily Herring Wilson. It’s a good book to read when it’s winter and there’s nothing to do in the garden (which is what it was when I started it). Katharine and Elizabeth started writing each other in 1958, the year I was born. K was an editor at the New Yorker magazine, and E was the author of at least one book when they started, as well as the garden columnist for her local newspaper, and a garden designer. It helps if you have read at least a bit of each women’s writing, I think, before reading these letters. (K’s …

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