Second Nature: A Gardener's Education - Michael Pollan - Paperback

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. 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 I'd 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 I'd expected to find. I began gardening for the same reasons people usually do: for the satisfaction of pulling bunches of carrots from one's own ground; the desire to make a patch of land more hospitable or productive; the urge to recover a place remembered from childhood, and the basic need to keep the forest from swallowing up one's house. When my wife and I bought our first place in 1983--a sliver of a derelict dairy farm on the eastern edge of the Housatonic Valley--we had been living in Manhattan for some time, in an apartment that receives approximately ninety minutes of sunlight a day, and the prospect of growing a few flowers and vegetables seemed exotic. There was also the matter of the advancing forest, which did in fact threaten to engulf our house, a little cape that had been assembled from a Sears, Roebuck kit in 1929. I had to do something--either mow the weed patch that passed for a lawn, or put in a real garden-if I hoped to keep the woods at bay. So I guess you could say the forest made me do it. But there was also, mixed in with my motives, the recollected satisfactions of childhood gardens. Growing up on Long Island in the early 1960s, I'd cared for a succession of pocket gardens in various corners of my parents' suburban plot, and had spent many Saturdays helping out my grandfather in the much grander garden he tended a few miles away (Chapter 1 is a reminiscence of these places). Now I had some ground of my own, and gardening it seemed a natural way to spend my weekends, something I might even have a knack for. Judith had other ideas. Though her position would eventually soften, she started out a sworn enemy of gardening, having been forced as a child to do yard work. I think she was also less troubled by the derelict parts of our property than I was, finding beauty in the march of brush across an abandoned hay field, or the rank, top-heavy growth of an apple tree in need of hard pruning. So she began making landscape paintings and I, with somewhat less striking results, began making landscapes. * * * It wasn't very long before I discovered I was ill-prepared for the work I'd taken on. The local New England landscape--a patchwork of abandoned farms swiftly being overtaken by second-growth forest--proved far less amenable to my plans for it than the tame suburban plots of my childhooPollan, Michael is the author of 'Second Nature: A Gardener's Education - Michael Pollan - Paperback' with ISBN 9780440504405 and ISBN 0440504406.