Last week after Kim and I had lunch, we stopped at the Brown Elephant thrift store in Oak Park to look at books. I found a couple of treasures and one of them was Katharine S. White's Onward and Upward in the Garden.
I have great interest in gardening essays, but Katharine White is of particular interest to me. She was the first fiction editor of The New Yorker, beginning in the year of its inception in 1925. She not only advised Harold Ross, the founding editor, on poetry and fiction, but established protocols on artwork, advertising, and general policies. "She recognized and bought the first works of such literary lights as EB White, James Thurber, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Clarence Day, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Jean Stafford, Ogden Nash and John Cheever, among others. Ross recognized her natural superiority in such matters and made her his right-hand woman."1 She retired in 1960.
It is through the letters of E. B. White that I am familiar with Katharine S. White, their professional lives and their life together. (They married in 1929.) This is Katharine’s only book of essays, edited (by E. B. White) and released posthumously. With delight, I paid my $1.00 at the thrift and have spent such lovely moments this past week reading Katharine's thoughts on gardening and gardening culture.
The first several essays are reviews of seed catalogs, which Katharine treated as serious literature. With warmth, humor and a critical eye, she commented on writing style, technical information, picture quality, aesthetics, horticultural, and botanical practices. Her descriptions of certain catalogs inspired me to take note of the contemporary literature in front of me in the form of seed packets and my own John Scheepers catalog.
This brings me to “Nose Twisters.”
While eating lunch yesterday at my table in the garden, I looked at the seed packet that I am using as a bookmark in Onward and Upward in the Garden. Not only is the outside of the packet chock full of useful information including plant height, light requirements, planting instructions and schedule, but it is adorned with a lovely water color of the Cherry Rose Jewel Nasturtium which is identified on the interior of the packet as painted by Pat Fostvedt of Morrison, Colorado, who is an artist “well known for her sensitive and lyrical floral paintings.”
Also included on the inside of the packet is additional information pertaining to indoor and outdoor light assessment, a confident endorsement of the quality of Botanical Interests’ product, and instructions on where to research information concerning one’s average last day of frost. My favorite information comes under the heading “Historical Information.”
“The botanical name, Tropaeolum, came from the Greek word for ‘trophy,’ in reference to its shield shaped leaves. The Latin name, Nasturtium, comes from “nasus” and “tortus’, roughly translating as ‘nose twister’ due to the plant’s pungent scent and peppery taste. In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors brought Nasturtiums back from the jungles of Mexico and Peru. A Spanish doctor, Nicholas Mondardes, took an interest in them and began collecting more samples from returning sailors. He later published the first herbal text about plants found in the New World. The Nasturtium gained popularity in Spain, eventually found its way to England and France, and then back to North American gardens.”2
And I am delighted that it did. The brilliant jewel tones of the flowers in the sun have filled my eyes and my heart with joy. And I am grateful to the writers at Botanical Interests for adding another element of pleasure: an association, seemingly unrelated, of schoolyard bullying. Which is, in fact, one of the main reasons I planted these flowers. They sit at the corners of the raised beds that hold tomatoes and peppers and melons and their duty is to ward off pests with their punchy odor. Nose twisters indeed.
1Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A21723608, Katharine S. White - Rewriter of Noon
2 Botanical Interests, Inc.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 at 5:52AM 
