Amateur she was, but although she lacked special knowledge and a background of science, she was bountifully endowed with strong feelings, a sure taste for what was simple and good, and the excitement and the fun that came with discovery. She had a fierce loyalty to common gifts of nature: goldenrod, pussy willows, dandelions, violets, wild flowers. As she began evaluating the catalogues of the professionals, she was enchanted to find that these articulate nurserymen were not just names on a page, they were live actors on her chosen stage; they were writers, and they were a special breed of cat -- stylists of sorts, quarrelsome, opinionated, outspoken, and loaded with exact information and personal bias. They fascinated her but failed to intimidate her, and when Amos Pettingill, the sage of White Flower Farm, whose name sounded a bit too Dickensian for her taste, described in his catalogue a French pussy willow as "not the unreliable wild Pussy Willow," this was too much for my New England wife. "What is unreliable, pray, about the native wild pussies?" she retorted. "I have found them trustworthy in every respect."
--E. B. White on Katherine S. White, author.
