ONWARD AND UPWARD IN THE GARDEN

by Katharine S. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 1979

It must have been a dream come true,"" writes E. B. White, for seedsmen and nurserymen ""to wake up and discover that their precious catalogues and their purple prose were being examined by a critical mind in the pages of a well-regarded publication."" And for twelve years thereafter (1958+), Katharine White continued to review garden literature eclectically in the New Yorker. In the early essays, she looks mostly at seed catalogues and comments on the seedsmen as stylists. She spots trends--making fluffy flowers fluffier; miniaturization--and regrets the lack of attention to fragrance. The later pieces more often concern garden books of the season, evaluated apropos of past classics, especially the 19th-century work of Gertrude Jekyll. In both cases she judges the reading value and also production details--color photography, line drawings, etc. She is equally knowledgeable and appreciative in regard to wild flowers, but she writes less about them, and her selections are quirky overall: one old writer is excluded because he was a ""sourpuss."" The allusions, literary and otherwise, are broad and impeccable. And Mrs. White identifies odd experts: the Texas day-lilies man, the world tulip authority, the leading western hemisphere landscape artist, the local peony specialist. Also, which nurseries offer three-year-old plants (most sell two-year-old specimens) and which catalogues list specialty plants, like those which thrive near the oceans (information to be updated by appended lists here). She detests garden club rigidities and regrets the ""Japanese"" arrangements then prevalent--invariably ""ersatz."" Mrs. White was apt, her husband remarks appreciatively, to grub in the dirt in her Ferragamos (she employed a gardener too); and this idiosyncratic, unsentimental, keen-witted book will most delight those who also regard the garden as an eminently civilized domain.

Pub Date: July 9, 1979

ISBN: 0807085618

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION