The Garden Blogger's Book Club
Two Gardeners: A friendship in Letters: Katharine S. White & Elizabeth Lawrence
Edited by Emily Herring Wilson
A glimpse into another time, not so removed from ours, and yet such a strange landscape. A world where Lawrence keeps files upon files of clippings from papers and magazines she collected from correspondents all over to further her plant knowledge. A world where DDT is sprayed regularly, all around the streets, with no notice to the residents. A world where Rachel Carson is just publishing Silent Spring, as a serial, in the New Yorker. The worlds of White and Lawrence, and the era in which they lived, are an interesting backdrop to their correspondence.
And the plants they write about? I wish that I could dedicate large chunks of time to tracking down such beauties as Peony Sylvia Saunders. Obtained by White in in fall of 1960, this plant was given a Memorial Award from the American Peony Society in 1974. When I look for it today, I find it mentioned at La Pivoinerie D'Aoust, a specialty nursery in Canada, but not available in their catalog. So once again, if you fancy a plant out of trade propagation, you will need to find someone who will send you a division. The more things change...
Today, we can use the internet to find all sorts of plants, some are plants that we are seeking and some are plants that we just find. We can protest the use of chemicals in our immediate environment, but not so much in our food production. We aren't watching our men and boys go off to Vietnam, but instead the go off to Iraq, to Somalia, to who knows where next...
But we bide by our gardens, tending our earth, and sending out our correspondences via computer. It's a much bigger world out there today, and so much smaller.
