Some great gardeners over the years have found time to write letters. Those of Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto were published in the 1990s, as was correspondence between American Leslie Land and Englishman Roger Phillips. Now, it's the turn of two New Zealand gardeners, as Gillian Vine finds.
Some 40 years after she attended Gisborne Girls High School, Canterbury hill farmer Virginia Pawsey organised a reunion of her seventh-form class.
At that Waitangi weekend event in 1998 was Wellington writer Janice Marriott and, with personal tragedy and a love of gardening in common, the pair began an email correspondence.
"We didn't know each other very well at school,'' Marriott explains, "as we were both bus girls and went on different buses.''
That meant their initial exchanges were "quite long, formal emails once a month or so'', she says.
"We wrote proper letters on email. I saw it as an opportunity to write and receive letters,'' Pawsey says.
"Never did I think that it was going to be a book.''
Although a professional writer, Marriott hadn't really considered turning the correspondence into a book until the day she said to herself, "Virginia is a really good writer.''
She asked Pawsey, who, not believing anything would come of it, agreed that Marriott could approach her publishers, HarperCollins, to see if there was any interest.
There was and Common Ground was under way. By then, the pair had been exchanging emails for about five years, so Marriott combed through them to make one book of one year.
The result is an often funny, sometimes moving account of their lives - Marriott using in-trays and discarded coffee containers from her central Wellington office to propagate plants, her battle to get new paths laid the way she wants, or setting her disgusted golden Labrador Bunsen to guard the cat door.
Or Pawsey putting potting mix on the farm account, hoping her husband, Harry, won't notice, watching a stock agent crawling under a huge rose to get to the back door; Marriott bemoaning the theft of her ripe grapes or the need to say no to more roses and Pawsey's battle to grow tomatoes outside.
The most moving account is Pawsey looking back at the Cave Creek tragedy in 1995, in which her son, Kit, lost his life.
"I always believed a mother would know if a child was in pain. There were no signs that morning, no forebodings, only the slow plodding cows, the clanging of the crush, the stinking mud and the stinging rain,'' she writes.
The Pawseys have celebrated Kit's life, "doing what he loved'', with a native garden and its creation is recorded in Common Ground.
The two gardeners are very different. Marriott has a tiny cottage garden in central Wellington and uses gardening, in part, as a way of unwinding, while Pawsey has a big garden "but not one of those huge gardens that occupy all my time. I'm a farmer first.''
Pawsey lived in Christchurch before moving to High Tops, a 2800ha property near Hawarden, 34 years ago.
"I had no idea you could live anywhere [in New Zealand] where you had frost every month of the year except perhaps January,'' she says.
It hasn't stopped her trying to grow unsuitable plants.
"We all do it. We all try things that are beautiful that we shouldn't really be growing,'' Pawsey says.
"It's so frustrating.''
She has a love affair with outdoor tomatoes and has tried heritage varieties this season, of which the most successful was Bloody Butcher.
"I can still grow plenty of good, fresh vegetables,'' she says of the climate.
"All you need is a touch of realism.''
She and Marriott both recommend tatsoi as one of the hardiest vegetables, with Marriott - who lived in the city a decade ago - assuring Dunedin readers it will grow here.
Pawsey says: "I love my vegetable garden and hope people who read the book will be encouraged to grow vegetables, as the home vegetable patch seems under threat.''
Also regretted is "the demise of the perennial border'', something that has seen respected mail-order companies such as Peak Perennials closing.
Both women are avid readers of garden catalogues, poring over every one they can and, in Pawsey's case, ordering almost all seeds and plants by mail.
The exchanges on what they have ordered and what grows make entertaining and sometimes inspiring reading.
Gardening dominates Common Ground but Marriott says: "It's not solely about gardening. It's about two contrasting lives.''
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