by Elizabeth Lawrence & Ann Preston Bridgers (edited by Emily Herring Wilson)

Elizabeth Lawrence was the first woman to graduate from the landscape design program at what is now North Carolina State University and, in the early 1930s, was struggling to make a career for herself in Raleigh, where there was little work for a woman landscape designer.

Meanwhile, Ann Preston Bridgers, a Raleigh native and co-founder of the Little Theater, had become a Broadway sensation, writing Coquette with George Abbott and starring Helen Hayes. It became Mary Pickford's first talking movie in 1929, for which she won an Oscar.

Bridgers was a great nurturer of young writing talent and she struck up a friendship and correspondence with Lawrence, encouraging her to write about her love of plants and gardening for newspapers and women's magazines, and to put that writing into a book.

That book became A Southern Garden and is still hailed as a classic, even 75+ years later. Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is a wonderful collection of letters from Elizabeth to Ann, and further builds on Emily Herring Wilson’s No One Gardens Alone, A Life of Elizabeth Lawrence.