No One Gardens Alone: A Life of Elizabeth Lawrence

The first biography of the renowned Southern gardening writer by the editor of the acclaimed book Two Gardeners

Elizabeth Lawrence (1904–1985) 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.