Above image is the cover of:
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
More books in the category:
Environmental Sustainability
by: Michael Pollan
Topics include: garden ethic, wilderness ethic, ornamental gardening, modern roses, gardening world, perennial border, hortus conclusus, garden writers, green thumb
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Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
This isn't so much a how-to on gardening as a how-to on thinking about gardening. It follows the course of the natural year, from spring through winter, as Pollard, an editor at Harper's , chronicles his growth as a gardener in Connecticut's rocky Housatonic Valley. Starting out as a "child of Thoreau," Pollard soon realized that society's concept of culture as the enemy of nature would get him a bumper crop of weeds and well-fed woodchucks but no vegetables to eat. Far more serviceable materially and philosophically, he now finds, is the metaphor of a garden, where nature and culture form a harmonious whole. Pollard finds ample time for musing on how his own tasks fit in with the overall scheme of existence; thus, there are chapters titled "Compost and Its Moral Imperatives" and "The Idea of a Garden." Although serious in import, the writing is never ponderous; Pollard's wit flashes throughout, and particularly in anecdotes about his youth: one memorable incident has his father mowing his initials in the front yard after being reproached by a suburban neighbor about his overgrown lawn.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Pollan, executive editor of Harper's and self-proclaimed amateur gardener, has written a book that is by turns charming and annoying, insightful and shallow, droll and banal. His collection of a dozen essays arranged by season is based on his experiences over a seven-year period in his Connecticut garden, along with vignettes from garden history. Unfortunately, Pollan's text is characterized by dubious and unsupported generalities, self-conscious humor, and extended, labored metaphors, and his lack of gardening authority dooms the book to superficiality. Experienced gardeners and devotees of garden literature will find little here that is original. Only for comprehensive gardening collections.
- Richard Shotwell, Hancock Shaker Village, Pittsfield, Mass.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Second Nature is...as delicious a meditation on one man's relationship with the Earth as any you are likely to come upon...."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Usually when Americans have wanted to explore their relationship to nature they've gone to the wilderness, or the woods. Michael Pollan went to the garden instead...and he's returned with a quirky and pleasing book....The debut of a fresh and provocative voice in American writing."
--Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood
"Superb....One of the distinguished gardening books of our time."
--USA Today
"A joy to read...[Pollan] writes with humor, acerbity, magnanimity...and all those good qualities that lead to charm and--one almost dares say it--wisdom."
--Los Angeles Times
Book Description
In his articles and in best-selling books such as The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan has established himself as one of our most important and beloved writers on modern man's place in the natural world. A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere. Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the seventy-five greatest books ever written about gardening, Second Nature captures the rhythms of our everyday engagement with the outdoors in all its glory and exasperation. With chapters ranging from a reconsideration of the Great American Lawn, a dispatch from one man's war with a woodchuck, to an essay about the sexual politics of roses, Pollan has created a passionate and eloquent argument for reconceiving our relationship with nature.
Inside Flap Copy
Eight years ago, Harper's Magazine editor Michael Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm. He planted a garden and attempted to follow Thoreau's example: do not impose your will upon the wilderness, the woodchucks, or the weeds. That ethic did not, of course, work. But neither did pesticides or firebombing the woodchuck burrow. So Michael Pollan began to think about the troubled borders between nature and contemporary life.
The result is a funny, profound, and beautifully written book in the finest tradition of American nature writing. It inspires thoughts on the war of the roses; sex and class conflict in the garden; virtuous composting; the American lawn; seed catalogs, and the politics of planting a tree. A blend of meditation, autobiography, and social history, Second Nature is ultimately a modern Walden: a true classic for our time. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Michael Pollan is Executive Editor of Harper's Magazine. His writing on the garden and nature has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's and Best American Essays
Waiting to exhale
SECOND NATURE by Michael Pollen is a collection of esays that are not always well-connected or well-written. Mr. Pollen has won awards for his essays and some of them are quite good, however, the book is uneven. I think many of the readers who provided glowing reviews must have concentrated on the front half of the book which is autobiographical and hysterically funny.
NATURE contains several distinct sections Pollan calls "Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter" but his essays do not "follow" the gardening year. For example, "Fall", the third section of the book is about the destruction of Cathedral Pines, a nature preserve owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy in Connecticut. Mr. Pollan thinks the local town folk (he is one) should have decided "what to do" in the aftermath of the storm which toppled the old pine trees that had inhabited the Cathedral Pines since the days of the American Revolution. Pollan would have done better to call this section "Why I think I understand Mother Nature better than the Nature Conservancy." And, maybe he does, but his essay is angry, and his anger affects his argument. After reading his essay, I am not persuaded the Nature Conservancy failed since Pollan fails to provide their side of the argument which might have been quite reasonable.
The best part of Pollan's book contains his autobiographical essays about life with his father who refused to mow the lawn much to the consternation of his upscale neighbors; life with his maternal grandfather who made mega-bucks as a professional gardener and green grocer; and Pollan's own attempts to take up gardening as an avocation. Anyone who has ever gardened will enjoy these sections because as all good gardeners know, most folks learn through trial and error. Mr. Pollen says there are few "Green Thumbs" i.e. Green thumbs exist, but they are rare.
The book is laced with historical factoids--an eclectic assortment of information Mr. Pollan gleaned from many articles and books by garden/nature and other writers including James Frazier, Thoreau, Emerson, Alexander Pope, Henry Mitchell, Eleanor Perenyi, Allen Lacey, Elizabeth Lawrence, and Katherine White who wrote garden essays for the New Yorker magazine. Mr. Pollen is advertised on the jacket of his book as an "Executive Editor" of Harper's magazine, and as I read his book, I formed an image of him snipping bits and pieces from the various articles and books he edited over time and sticking them together, i.e. a cut and paste job. Mr. Pollan's book needed a better editor, and I haven't read such an entertaining, provocative and frustrating book in a long time.