Second Nature

Pick it up: If you like books about gardening, if you want to read a thoughtful book about our relationship with the natural world, if you want to read a beautifully written memoir.

This is one of Michael Pollan’s earliest books, written more than thirty years ago. By his own account, he’s always been a keen gardener, and though this is the only book that he’s written about gardening, it is (as tends to be the case with his writing) one of the best books about gardening you could possibly read.

This is a memoir in which Pollan writes about the garden that he made from scratch in the land surrounding an old dairy farm in Connecticut that he and his wife purchased as their first home. He’d been interested in gardening from the time he was a child, and he’d taken care of a succession of what he calls pocket gardens, but this was the first time that he had enough land to lay out a proper garden, and it was out in the country unlike the suburban gardens that he’d previously tended.

He writes about his battles with slugs and woodchucks, and the second growth forest that surrounded his home, he writes of his successes and failures even as he muses about Thoreau and his belief that man should not impose his will on nature, an idea that works well enough when you’re in the wilderness, but becomes a bit difficult when you’re in a garden trying to protect your vegetable patch from the many creatures who want to eat your crop.

He goes on to write about the peculiarity of American nature writing which tends to think of nature only in terms of the wilderness, nature untouched by man. That is well enough in its place, but we exist in the natural world and we interact with it all the time. We need a way of thinking about nature that is broad enough to encompass the things we take from it and the ways in which we use it. Ideal as it sounds, we can’t take a hands-off approach to the natural world, not if we want to feed ourselves and meet many of our other needs.

He writes that we have long tended to see nature and culture as being opposed to each other, so that what culture gains, nature loses and vice versa. This is a fundamentally wrong-headed notion. And given the current state of the world, it is more important than ever that we learn how to engage with nature, and use it to provide for our needs without damaging it. He suggests that the answer to this question is more likely to be found in the garden than in the forest or the woodland because the garden is a place where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that benefits both.