Henry Mitchell grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and attended the University of Virginia. Before joining the Washington Post in 1970, he was a reporter on the Memphis Commercial Appeal and editor of the Delta Review. In addition to the Sunday gardening column, "Earthman," he wrote the "Any Day" column which appeared each Friday in the Post (his collection of essays from that column (1997) is also entitled Any Day. He died in 1993. There are two other collections of Mitchell's "Earthman" columns in print: One Man's Garden (1992) and Henry Mitchell on Gardening (1998).