Synopses & Reviews
The first biography of the renowned Southern gardening writer by the editor of the acclaimed book Two Gardeners
Elizabeth Lawrence (19041985) lived a singular, contradictory life. She was a true Southerner; a successful, independent gardening writer with her own newspaper column and numerous books to her credit; a dutiful daughter who cared for her elders and always lived with her mother; a landscape architect; an accomplished poet; a friend of literary figures like Eudora Welty and Joseph Mitchell; and a woman people called St. Elizabeth” behind her back. Lawrence earned many fans during her lifetime and gained even more after her death with the reissue of many of her classic books. When Emily Herring Wilson edited a collection of letters between Lawrence and famed New Yorker editor Katherine S. White in Two Gardeners, she found legions of readers, in the South and elsewhere, who were eager to know more about the legendary Lawrence.
Now, one hundred years after her birth, No One Gardens Alone tells for the first time the story of this fascinating woman. Like classic biographies of literary figures such as Emily Dickinson or Edna St. Vincent Millay, this book reveals Lawrence in all her complexity and establishes her, at last, as one of the premier gardeners and writers of the twentieth century.
About the Author
Emily Herring Wilson is a writer, lecturer, and novice gardener living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is author of Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South and coauthor of North Carolina Women: Making History. She has taught at Wake Forest University, Salem College, and Cornell University and is a MacDowell Fellow.