Our next Lost Lady of Garden Writing is Mrs. Francis King. She was the editor and sometimes the author behind all of the books in The Little Garden series published in the 1920s. Truth be told, she's not lost! Not like the other garden writers we've been looking for this summer. Mrs. Francis King was easy to find. In an article published by the New York Botanical Garden, they revealed that at one time she was considered "the fairy godmother of gardening". Quoting that … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Mrs. Francis King
lost ladies of garden writing
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Frances Edge McIlvaine
Miss Frances Edge McIlvaine is our next Lost Lady of Garden Writing. As with the other lost ladies, at first I thought there wouldn't be much to find out about Frances, or Fannie as her friends called her. I knew, of course, that she'd written Spring in the Little Garden (1928), another book in the Little Garden Series edited by Mrs. Francis King, because I have it in my library. Otherwise, I'm not sure if our paths would have crossed. The Find a Grave website shows a rather plain … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Frances Edge McIlvaine
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Dorothy Giles
Continuing through the authors of The Little Garden Series of books (edited by Mrs. Francis King), we find our next Lost Lady of Garden Writing, Dorothy Giles, who wrote The Little Kitchen Garden (1926). Dorothy wasn't easy to find on the internet until I started to put "author" as part of the search term. Even that didn't serve up quite as much information as you would expect for an author who wrote at least eight books. I found some basic information about Dorothy Giles from a website … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Dorothy Giles
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing – Ella Porter McKinney
As more irises begin to appear in the garden, I've found another lost lady of garden writing, Ella Porter McKinney, who wrote Iris in the Little Garden (1927). I will confess I didn't find very much information about Ella. Like other writers in The Little Garden series of books from the 1920s, she appears to have been involved with a local garden club—hers was in Madison, New Jersey—and the National Garden Club of America. I did figure out after many searches that she got married in … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing – Ella Porter McKinney
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Alice Harding
"No garden can really be too small to hold a peony. Had I but four square feet of ground at my disposal, I would plant a peony in the centre and proceed to worship." And thus we are introduced to another Lost Lady of Garden Writing, Alice Harding (Mrs. Edward Harding). Alice, as I'm going to call her throughout this blog post, was rather elusive for me to easily find information about her life until I did a search for "Alice Harding Plant." This eventually took me to an article about … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Alice Harding
Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Kate L. Brewster
(Inspired by a podcast called Lost Ladies of Lit, I've decided to write an occasional post about lost ladies of garden writing.) We begin with Kate L. Brewster, simply because her book was the first one I grabbed when I was going through my personal library of old gardening books. The Little Garden for Little Money, by Kate L. Brewster (1924) is part of a series of books called The Little Garden Series edited by Mrs. Francis King (Louisa Yeomans King). Brewster notes in the forward of … [Read more...] about Lost Ladies of Garden Writing: Kate L. Brewster
