What I read last week: the back to the garden edition

Although I have publicized my gardening victories, I have not been terribly forthcoming about the defeats. I tend to take these really personally -- my failures, c'est moi -- because I have not yet fully absorbed the first lesson of gardening. That lesson: you will always end up killing something. In the most recent case, I ended up frying my nasturtiums during last week's hot period: I had not anticipated that the unprotected western exposure they had would parch them so quickly.

So it was especially reassuring to read a book in which a smarter person and more avid gardener maps out what he's learned over years of hard-core gardening. Michael Pollan's Second Nature is an elegant, erudite, wryly funny meditation on what tending a garden is. Much of the book revisits what he sees as the externally-imposed conflict of nature versus culture, and this culminates in the chapter "The Idea of a Garden." His ten-point garden ethic  is a provocative springboard for any discussion on humanity's role in the wide world. In my opinion, it should be handed out for required reading in undergraduate-level ecology classes.

Then again, I'd also assign Hannah Holmes' Suburban Safari, which I re-read this week. Her tone is less lofty: where Pollan's prose references earlier garden writers and literary references to man's relationship viz nature, Holmes' writing is studded with juicy interviews and meaty little explanations. She also takes a much different approach to the panolopy of non-human life in her space. While Pollan writes, "The gardener feels he has a legitimate quarrel with nature -- with her weeds and storms and plagues, her rot and death," Holmes writes of the animals who make up nature, "Neighbors, friends, the division is blurry. The Indians who owned my yard a few hundred years ago had a word that meant 'relatives of a strange race': ntu'tem ... Strange family, indeed. But my family. Mine to cherish, and mine to take care of to the best of my ability."

This isn't to imply that Pollan is a DDT-hoarding, monoculture-loving monster. It's just that he takes the approach that "the gardener doesn't take it for granted that man's impact on nature will be negative" and that it's possible to actively meddle in the affairs of the environment for morally defensible reasons. (Honestly, I wonder what he'd say about Foamgate.)

These writers together are like whole-brain reading for the amateur gardener. I had found Holmes on my own, but I owe a big thank-you to Stephanie for recommending Pollan to me.

Comments

[Stephanie]

I'm so glad you liked the Pollan. I plan on starting his newest book next week - The Omnivore's Dilemma.