Picture if you can Katharine S. White, wife of E. B. White and an editor at The New Yorker for 34 years, at home poring over seed catalogues, gardening books, and texts on gardening history. Then picture her as a nurse caring for an ailing African violet, a shrewd analyst taking a "census" of the leaves on her four amaryllis bulbs, or a folk artist waxing and polishing her gourds. These are among the activities she describes in this delightful book.

In the introduction, E. B. White notes: "For K-a room without a flowering plant was an empty shell." This collection of 14 pieces originally printed in The New Yorker (from 1958 to 1970) and now released posthumously give us a sense of the author's delight in flowers, shrubs, vines, bulbs, and nursery stock. Katharine White puts her likes and dislikes up-front: she loves chrysanthemums ("the most universal, the most diverse of flowers" and scorns borage; she enjoys the fragrances of irises and can't tolerate the gigantic blooms of hybrid marigolds; she relishes simple floral arrangements and detests the plastic pots of store-bought plants. Her reviews of seed catalogues are interesting and varied, giving amateur horticulturists courage to stay abreast in a more and more specialized field.

Onward and Upward in the Garden is a must-have volume for learners in the Green Thumb School.