Pollan - Second nature: a gardeners education

Michael Pollan

Second Nature

Deft and often dazzling... about gardening, but only in the same way that Dantes Divine Comedy 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 York Times

You dont have to be a gardener to love Second Nature. Pollan is a marvelous essayist: indeed, he is to gardens what Lewis Thomas is to medicineexpert, witty, and original.

Frances FitzGerald

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

Thomas DEvelyn, The Christian Science Monitor

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

Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

Hes 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 whats 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 Ive been permanently Pollan-ated.

Christopher Buckley, Vanity Fair

Pollan is a hybrida 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.

Chicago Tribune

Wonderful writing... These elegant, lively, and impeccably crafted essays [offer] 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, Pollans 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... [Pollans] essays are funny and profound, elegant and basic.... [Second Nature] is the story of Pollans 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.

Elle Dcor

I love this book... 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 of an Amateur Builder

The Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World

Second Nature

A GARDENERS EDUCATION

Michael Pollan

Copyright 1991 by Michael Pollan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the
facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a
review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to
photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or
publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the
work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

The author wishes to thank the editors of Harpers Magazine
and The New York Times Magazine, where versions of several
chapters first appeared.

Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pollan, Michael.
Second nature / by Michael Pollan.
ISBN-10:0-8021-4011-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4011-1
1. Gardening. 2. GardeningPhilosophy. I. Title.
SB455.P58 1991 635.9--dc20 90-20960

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

08 09 10 11 12 12 11 10 9 8 7

FOR JUDITH

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.

Both of these gardens have had a lot to teach me, and not only, as it turned out, about gardening. For I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before Id also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature (was I within my rights to murder the woodchuck that had been sacking my vegetable garden all spring?); about the somewhat peculiar attitudes toward the land that an American is born with (why is it the neighbors have taken such a keen interest in the state of my lawn?); about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, the moral implications of landscape design, and several other questions that the wish to harvest a few decent tomatoes had not prepared me for. It may be my nature to complicate matters unduly, to search for large meanings in small things, but it did seem that there was a lot more going on in the garden than Id expected to find.