Michael Pollan - Second Nature: A Gardeners Education

Michael Pollan

Second Nature

"Deft and often dazzling ... about gardening, but only in the same way that Dante's Divine Coined), is about getting lost in the woods.... I know no book on gardening that is quite as illuminating and fascinating as this one."

-Allen Larcy, The New }ink Times

"You don't have to be a gardener to love Second Nature. Pollan is a marvelous essayist: indeed, he is to gardens what Lewis Thomas is to medicine-expert, witty, and original."

-Frances FitzGerald

"Second Nature is to gardening what Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler is to fishing. Combining humor, natural description, and advice, it's not so much about compost, seeds, seasons, and pests as it is about human nature."

-Thomas l)'Evelyn, The Christian Science Monitor

"Wonderful ... Pollan brings the shrewd eye of a social historian.... Most things in Pollan's book work upward toward metaphor-even though he takes care to root every metaphor in aerated soil, rich with the compost of organic experience."

-Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

"He's written a book about gardening that even non-gardeners might want to read.... Pollan can still remember that there are readers of intelligence and curiosity whose gardening habits amount to no more than a stroll through the yard every month or so to see what's died."

-Malcolm Jones Jr., Newsweek

"As a non-gardener, I never expected to stay up late and laugh out loud at a book like this, but I've been permanently Pollan-ated."

-Christopher Buckley, Vanity Fair

"Pollan is a hybrid-a gardener-philosopher-humorist-polemicist who has written a book that manages to amuse while it muses, a book that lures even the non-gardener into the physical and metaphysical garden."

-Jocelyn McClurg, The Harford Courant

"As a gardener, I read this charming and ultimately profound book with admiration and, I must admit, some envy; as a writer, with pleasure."

-Witold Rybczynski

"Articulate and funny, Second Nature is my idea of a gardening book.... What [Pollan] sets out as his aim, and finds ... is something outside the usual American alternatives, which seem to consist of either raping the land or sealing it away in preserve where no other can touch it. That place is a garden."

-ChiraQo Tribune

"Wonderful writing... These elegant, lively, and impeccably crafted essays Ioiferl us a provocative new way of approaching our environmental problems.... At a time when it seems we must choose between unchecked development or no development at all, Pollan's idea of the world as a garden could offer us a way out of the wilderness."

-Inga Saffron, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"The best gardening book I have read in memory, perhaps ever ... [Pollan's] essays are funny and profound, elegant and basic.... I Second Naturel is the story of Pollan's effort to coexist with nature, forging a middle ground between allowing nature to fulfill its tendency to run rampant ... and restraining it completely a la American suburbia and its broad, picture-perfect lawns."

-Nancy Brachey, The Charlotte Observer

"A bounty of food for thought ... [Pollan) takes a deep look at our spiritual, ethical, environmental connection to the garden and land itself, philosophically exploring our attitude toward nature and wilderness and how each should be tended."

-Karen A. Cleath, The Tampa Tribune

"A serious undertaking and an important book, a reasoned argument with Thoreau and others about the wilderness ethic and how much or little it can tell us about what our attitude toward nature ought to be."

-Christopher Reed, Horticulture

"A book for the nightstand, not the coffee table or potting shed ... A merry read with a major message: garden nirvana may be only a state of mind."

-Ellc Decor

"I love this hook ... the author is witty and spirited. Everything he writes reveals as much of himself as it does of gardening."

-Hortus

"Unlike any other gardening book that will appear this season or for many seasons to come. While it may, or may not, help you grow things more successfully, it will almost Surely make you think better, even if you have never been tempted to bring ordered growth out of the earth. It is a book for readers first and gardeners second; a book that is wise and funny and an effortless pleasure to read."

-American Way

"An important and profoundly original book ... A well-developed philosophy of life and nature in a technological world."

-Kirkus Reviews

"Quirky and pleasing ... The debut of a fresh and provocative voice in American writing."

-Annie Dillard

Also by Michael Pollan:

A Place of My Own: The Education el an Amateur Builder

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Second Nature

Second Nature

A GARDENER'S EDUCATION

Michael Pollan

FOR JUDITH

Contents

CHAPTER 1: 7

Spring

CHAPTER 2: 37

CHAPTER 3: 54

CHAPTER 4: 66

Summer

CHAPTER 5: 79

CHAPTER 6: 98

CHAPTER 7: 117

Fall

CHAPTER 8: 137

CHAPTER 9: 150

CHAPTER 10: 176

Winter

CHAPTER 11: 205

CHAPTER 12: 229

Introduction

This book is the story of my education in the garden. The garden in question is actually two, one more or less imaginary, the other insistently real. The first is the garden of books and memories, that dreamed-of outdoor utopia, gnat-free and ever in bloom, where nature answers to our wishes and we imagine feeling perfectly at home. The second garden is an actual place, consisting of the five acres of rocky, intractable hillside in the town of Cornwall, Connecticut, that I have been struggling to cultivate for the past seven years. Much separates these two gardens, though every year I bring them a little more closely into alignment.