Onward and Upward in the Garden

In 1925, Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine’s first fiction editor, discovering and championing the work of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, James Thurber, Marianne Moore, and her husband-to-be, E. B. White, among others. After years of cultivating fiction, she set her sights on a new genre: garden writing. On March 1, 1958, The New Yorker ran a column entitled “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” a critical review of garden catalogs, in which White extolled the writings of “seedmen and nurserymen,” those unsung authors who produced her “favorite reading matter.” Thirteen more columns followed, exploring the history and literature of gardens, flower arranging, herbalists, and developments in gardening. Two years after her death in 1977, E. B. White collected and published the series, with a fond introduction. The result is this sharp-eyed appreciation of the green world of growing things, of the aesthetic pleasures of gardens and garden writing, and of the dreams that gardens inspire.

Katharine White (1896–1977) was the first fiction editor at The New Yorker, a position she held from 1925 to 1959. Hailed by James Thurber as the “fountain and shrine of The New Yorker,” White did more than almost any other editor to shape the magazine into the literary giant it is today, championing the work of writers like John O’Hara, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever, and countless others. She and her husband, E. B. White, lived in New York City and North Brooklin, Maine, where she gardened.

E. B. White (1899–1985) was an American essayist and novelist known for an eloquent, witty, and almost effortless writing style that appealed to readers of all ages. His three children’s books—Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan—are considered classics and he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his body of work. His masterful Here Is New York, considered one of the ten best books ever written about New York City, is available from The Little Bookroom.