Onward and Upward in the Garden Book

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.