“I must tell you how much pleased I was that you are able to write so good a letter for a little girl,” wrote Nannie Bradenbaugh to her granddaughter, Elizabeth Lawrence. “I know of no greater accomplishment than to write a good letter.”

Taking her words to heart, Lawrence — “slowly, quietly, and with growing confidence in her own ability” — began her journey to become one of the America’s best-known writers of classical garden literature. Her guide and companion on that journey for more than 30 years was her best friend and neighbor, Ann Preston Bridgers.

Now, Emily Herring Wilson, author of the acclaimed biography of Elizabeth Lawrence, “No One Gardens Alone,” has compiled Lawrence’s letters to Ann Bridgers in her new book, “Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence: Discovered Letters of a Southern Gardener,” which she will present on Thursday, June 3, at 11 a.m. at The Country Bookshop in downtown Southern Pines.

“Opening this collection is like unsealing a hundred envelopes in which a close woman friend confides her changing inner life,” Doris Betts wrote about Wilson’s book. “Elizabeth Lawrence flowers here from Southern girl to famous gardener. So does the friendship that helped her grow and flourish.”

A decade ago, when Wilson began writing about Elizabeth Lawrence, she discovered several hundred of her letters in the Ann Preston Bridgers Papers at Duke University Perkins Library. (No letters from Bridgers to Lawrence were found.)

“They were the kind of unexpected discovery that keeps writers working,” Wilson says, “and I used them more than any other source in ‘No One Gardens Alone.’ I still regard it as a miracle that they were not destroyed after Ann’s death in 1967, but ended up in the Bridgers Papers.”

Of the thousands of letters Lawrence wrote over her lifetime, Wilson thinks those to Bridgers brought her to life as no other materials, including interviews with family and friends who had known her.

“I always hoped I might find an audience for the letters themselves, because I think they are some of the most charming I have read,” Wilson adds. “Moreover, they represent the last hurrah of an age of letters we are not likely to see again. Among the books I have been privileged to write or edit, ‘Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence’ is my favorite because of the charm and intelligence of a private life.”

Elizabeth Lawrence was born in 1904 in Marietta, Ga. After graduating from Barnard College, she went to N.C. State College of Agriculture and Engineering in Raleigh where, in 1932, she was the first female graduate of the landscape design program.

She made her permanent home in Raleigh with her affluent parents in 1933. She remained single, living with her mother in Raleigh in the 1930s and 1940s, and then in Charlotte until her death in 1985.

Lawrence, 30, met Ann Bridgers, 43, in 1933, when they began their lifelong correspondence. Bridgers was the acclaimed co-author, with George Abbott, of the 1927 hit Broadway play “Coquette” starring Helen Hayes, based on a murder in Rockingham, and the screen version with Mary Pickford in her 1929 Oscar-winning role in her first talkie.

Bridgers, also single, lived in Raleigh, where she founded the Raleigh Little Theatre, and frequently traveled to New York and to her family’s cabin in western North Carolina, where she wrote plays that were never produced.

“There is nothing like the revelation of a reticent person once started,” Lawrence wrote at the beginning of their decades-long friendship. “I hadn’t any friends … except you. I think you the most considerate person I know, and consideration is like Octagon soap on poison ivy.

“I love the way you always begin a letter by saying you wish you could talk instead. I consider the written word vastly (here I had to stop and wind the typewriter ribbon onto another spool) superior. For one thing you can say what you mean better, and for another you don’t get interrupted … You are the perfect person to write to.”

Ann Bridgers and her sister, Emily, encouraged Lawrence to write gardening articles for publication. “There are two reasons for trying to publish things,” Lawrence responded. “One is to make money, the other to be read. I can’t make any money; and I don’t want to be read.”

Despite her objections, Lawrence admitted “letters are the best practice and training that you could possibly have for writing.”

The Bridger sisters continued to provide encouragement and guidance as Lawrence later acknowledged.

“I never write a word of prose — even in a letter — without thinking of the things that you have taught me, and which are as exhilarating to me as a sharp pencil.” “Thank you for all you do for me. I am sure you have no idea how much.”

Through the late 1930s Lawrence worked on her book, “A Southern Garden.”

“I have something perfectly awful to tell you: It doesn’t matter whether my book ever gets published or not. I have had the fun of doing it, and I have learned what I need to know.” “A Southern Garden,” published in 1942, went on to become a classic and is still in print almost 70 years later.

As Lawrence’s reputation as the quintessential Southern gardener grew, she began corresponding with hundreds of people across the country, exchanging plant information and tips about gardening for her books and columns in The Charlotte Observer and other publications.

“These letters are the hardest and most important part of my work,” Lawrence wrote. But they represented a very different relationship than that with her closest friend and mentor.

“Correspondence has no connection with letter-writing, its purpose being an exchange of ideas, usually on some special subject. I have many correspondents. If they did not write to me, I would not write to them. But letter-writing is an end in itself. It is the simplest, most natural, and (to the writer) the most delightful form of self-expression.”

In 1935, a year after Lawrence began exchanging letters with Bridgers, she wrote, “It was your enthusiasm that made writing gardening articles so simple, and you had no sooner left than the magic vanished, like midnight in a fairytale.” Ann Bridgers left Elizabeth Lawrence in 1967 after losing her battle with cancer. “I knew I would be likely to outlive (her),” Lawrence wrote, “but I don’t yet see how I can do it.”

In 2004, Elizabeth Lawrence was posthumously named by Horticulture magazine as one of the 25 greatest gardeners in the world.

Emily Herring Wilson received the N.C. Award for Literature in 2006, NC’s highest civilian honor, and the John Tyler Caldwell Laureate in 2007, the state’s most prestigious public humanities award. She lives in Winston-Salem with her husband, Ed Wilson, a former provost of Wake Forest University.

For information, call The Country Bookshop at (910) 692-3211.