Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond with Elizabeth Lawrence
By Elizabeth Lawrence, edited by Ann L. Armstrong & Lindie Wilson, (Duke University Press, $24.95)
"This book collects a number of essays written by Elizabeth Lawrence for the Charlotte Observer. Leaving her well-known and loved garden in Raleigh, Elizabeth Lawrence and her mother moved to Charlotte in 1948, where Elizabeth designed the house and garden where they were to live. On August 11, 1957, when Elizabeth was fifty-three, her Sunday gardening column, Through the Garden Gate, appeared in the Charlotte Observer for the first time. She wrote 720 columns, the last of which was published June 20, 1971.
Bill Neal, a friend and fellow gardener, edited 142 of her columns, publishing them in 1990 as the book Through the Garden Gate. Lindie Wilson and I realized that some fascinating columns remained unavailable to most readers. We spent long afternoons peering over microfilms in the Charlotte Public Library. They were pleasure-filled hours…. Even after we eliminated the columns that pertained to flower shows, plant laundry lists and the like, many captivating and insightful articles remained… Long before I met her and her garden, and while I was building my own garden, I had fallen under the spell of Elizabeth Lawrence's writing when I read the 1942 edition of A Southern Garden. Reading these articles renewed that spell." --Excerpted from the Book's Introduction by Ann L. Armstrong
