Green Thoughts

By Michael Demarest

ONWARD AND UPWARD IN THE GARDEN

by Katharine S. White

Edited and with an introduction by

E.B. White; Farrar, Straus & Giroux;

362 pages; $12.95

She was a founding mother of The New Yorker. She was also a gardener, a fiercely dedicated grubber of New England soil, an avid and acerbic consumer of seed catalogues. She had readjust about everything written about greenery and had strong opinions on every specimen from azalea to zinnia. So strong that Katharine S. White managed to sow in the least rustic of magazines a classic series of green thoughts: on herbs and weeds, trees and seeds, pedigreed blooms and wildflowers. Her articles were written with elegance and precision, and they deserve a place with such horticultural classics as Charles Sprague Sargent's Manual of the Trees of North America and John Parkinson's A Garden of Pleasant Flowers, published in 1629 and still in print.

Katharine White, who died in 1977, was the wife of The New Yorker's redoubtable E.B. White, who has edited and updated her pieces, written between 1958 and 1970, and garlanded Onward and Upward in the Garden with a graceful introduction.

Fortunately for E.B. and the reader, Katharine White was not obsessed with petal detail. She bore no relation to the Mrs. Powers of Ogden Nash's poem, so preoccupied with flower arrangements that one day her spouse just

. . . walked off into the dawn,

And his wife just kept on refilling

vases and never noticed that he was gone.

Beware of floral arrangements;

They lead to marital estrangements.

K.S.W., as she was known, did of course fill her house with flowers year round, but she had little patience with the artsy floral constructions ("Zen and all zat") cherished by garden clubs. She never belonged to such an organization. "Sometimes," her husband recalls, "as I sat quietly in my corner, watching her throw flowers at each other, it looked as though she were playing darts in an English pub."

It was in the planning and planting of her garden in southern Maine that she found her deepest satisfaction. Like all serious gardeners, she was no April-to-September hobbyist. Her first magazine piece was written in February, the "season of lists and callow hopefulness" when hundreds of thousands of true gardeners are reading their catalogues and "dreaming their dreams." This month she would have been planning her spring bulb garden, ordering indoor plants for the winter and putting down fertilizer for the snows to drive into the soil.

Onward and Upward can be savored by the reader whose closest acquaintance with nature is the corner florist. It is a heady compost of observation, taste, wit and scholarship. She tells us, for example, that the first named variety of apple in North America was Blaxton's Yellow Sweeting, introduced around 1640 by a clergyman, William Blaxton, at what is now the corner of Charles and Beacon streets in Boston. One variety of the handsome blue lobelia was prized by the Indians as a cure for syphilis -- and bought for a pretty price by a gullible English nobleman. The colonizers were more astute about Solidago, or goldenrod, that "humble and glorious" wildflower, which they took home and improved and now sell back to Americans for fancy sums. Indeed, argues White, goldenrod, which has 54 native species and grows in every state of the Union, should be adopted as the national flower (the U.S. has none). If that should come to fruition, the flower should of course be rechristened Solidagowhiteana. --Michael Demarest

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