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As readers and critics around the country agree, any new book by the renowned garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence is like finding a buried treasure. A Rock Garden in the South will not disappoint. Released posthumously, this book is not only a welcome addition to the Lawrence canon, but fills an important gap in the garden literature on the middle South.
Lawrence, in her usual exquisite prose, deals with the full range of rock gardening topics in this work. She addresses the unique problem of cultivating rock gardens in the South, where the growing season is prolonged and humidity and heat are not conducive to such planting. She describes her own experiences in making a rock garden, with excellent advice on placing stones, constructing steps, ordering plants, and making cuttings.
At the same time, what she writes about here is in large part of interest to gardeners everywhere and for gardens with or without rocks. As always, she thoroughly discusses the plants she has tried—recommending bulbs and other perennials of all sorts, annuals, and woody plants—with poetic descriptions of the plants themselves as well as specific and useful cultural advice. A Rock Garden in the South includes an encyclopedia of plants alphabetized by genus and species and divided into two parts: wood and non-woody plants.

Elizabeth Lawrence (1904–85) is recognized as one of America’s most important gardeners and garden writers. In 1957, Lawrence began a weekly column for the Charlotte Observer, blending gardening lore and horticultural expertise gained from her own gardens in Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, and from her many gardener friends. This book presents 132 of her beloved columns. Never before published in book form, they were chosen from the more than 700 pieces that she wrote for the Observer over fourteen years.

Lawrence exchanged plants and gardening tips with everyone from southern “farm ladies” trading bulbs in garden bulletins to prominent regional gardeners. She corresponded with nursery owners, everyday backyard gardeners, and literary luminaries such as Katharine White and Eudora Welty. Her books, including A Southern Garden, The Little Bulbs, and Gardens in Winter, inspired several generations of gardeners in the South and beyond.

The columns in this volume cover specific plants, such as sweet peas, hellebores, peonies, and the bamboo growing outside her living-room window, as well as broader topics including the usefulness of vines, the importance of daily pruning, and organic gardening. Like all of Lawrence’s writing, these columns are peppered with references to conversations with neighbors and quotations from poetry, mythology, and correspondence. They brim with knowledge gained from a lifetime of experimenting in her gardens, from her visits to other gardens, and from her extensive reading.

Lawrence once wrote, “Dirty fingernails are not the only requirement for growing plants. One must be as willing to study as to dig, for a knowledge of plants is acquired as much from books as from experience.” As inspiring today as when they first appeared in the Charlotte Observer, the columns collected in Beautiful at All Seasons showcase not only Lawrence’s vast knowledge but also her intimate, conversational writing style and her lifelong celebration of gardens and gardening.

Elizabeth Lawrence occupies a secure place in the pantheon of twentieth-century gardening writers that includes Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West of Great Britain and Katherine S. White of the United States. Her books, such as A Southern Garden (1942) and The Little Bulbs (1957), remain in print, continuing to win praise from criticis and to delight an ever-widening circle of readers. In Gardening for Love, Lawrence reveals another world of garden writing, the world of the rural women of the South with whom she corresponded extensively from the late 1950s into the mid-1970s in responce to their advertisements for herbs and ornamental perennials in several market bulletins (published by state departments of agriculture for the benefit of farmers).

It was Eudora Welty who awakened Elizabeth Lawrence's interest in this fascinating topic by putting her name on the mailing list of The Mississippi Market Bulletin, a twice-monthly collection of classified advertisements founded in 1928 and still published today. Lawrence soon discovered market bulletins from the Carolinas and other Southern states, as well as similar bulletins published privately in the North. She began ordering plants from the bulletins, and there ensued a lively exchange of letters wit the women who sold them.

Gardening for Love is Lawrence's exploration of this little-known side of American horticulture and her affectionate tribute to country people who shared her passion for plants. Drawing on the letters she received, sometimes a great many of them from the same persons over many years, she delves into traditional plant lore, herbal remedies, odd and often highly poetic vernacular plant names peculiar to particular regions of the South, and the herb collectors of the mountains of the Carolinas and Georgia. She focuses primarily on the Southeast and the Deep South, but her wide knowledge of both literature and botany gives Gardening for Love a dimension that transcends the category of regional writing.

“A beautifully written book.”—The Garden Journal

“A few garden writers offer prose that goes beyond how to spade and spray to convey the experience and pleasures of gardening. The late Elizabeth Lawrence was such a writer.”—Southern Living

“First published in 1957 and out-of-print for many years, this is a delightfully written and enormously informative introduction to the fascinating variety of little bulbs available to the gardener. The author discusses a wide variety of plants, both familiar and little-known, including crocuses, species daffodils, hardy cyclamen and lily-family members such as Brodiaea, Bessera, and Calochortus.”—American Horticulturist