Hardcover, 279 pages
Published Jan. 4, 1996 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Gardening in the small and buggy, and active stewardship of all the land from lawn to wilderness; Pollan is a great essayist here in his first book.
With this exception of a terrific essay toward the end about the class politics of gardening catalogs, I found this book overwritten and boring. For me it didn't have nearly the readability or approachability of his later books.
With this exception of a terrific essay toward the end about the class politics of gardening catalogs, I found this book overwritten and boring. For me it didn't have nearly the readability or approachability of his later books.
Thoreau and Emerson wrote much about how to be in Nature, says Michael Pollan; they were all about how to be in the wilderness without interfering with it, but nobody had written about how to act in Nature, whether it was appropriate for humans to simply leave the natural world alone to take its course when they had a responsibility to care for it. He gives the example of a white-pine forest that was devastated by a storm; because it was perceived as having been ‘wilderness’ prior to the devastation, nothing was done about the resultant mess of fallen trees other than bulldozing a firebreak around it; a result that pleased nobody. Meanwhile investigations proved that it was not ancient wilderness at all but had been logged regularly until the middle of the present century.
Second Nature is the story of making a garden on the edge of the forest …
Thoreau and Emerson wrote much about how to be in Nature, says Michael Pollan; they were all about how to be in the wilderness without interfering with it, but nobody had written about how to act in Nature, whether it was appropriate for humans to simply leave the natural world alone to take its course when they had a responsibility to care for it. He gives the example of a white-pine forest that was devastated by a storm; because it was perceived as having been ‘wilderness’ prior to the devastation, nothing was done about the resultant mess of fallen trees other than bulldozing a firebreak around it; a result that pleased nobody. Meanwhile investigations proved that it was not ancient wilderness at all but had been logged regularly until the middle of the present century.
Second Nature is the story of making a garden on the edge of the forest in New England; but around this he places dozens of other stories, comments on the wide range of plant catalogues available in the USA (from the pretentious to the radical), illustrates the history of human perceptions of the tree (the Political, the Romantic, the Utilitarian), and writes about the peculiar American obsession with Lawn, and with not having walls or fences between your yard (or ‘garden’ as everyone else would say) and the next one.
