Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan. 

4/5 rating. 320 pages.

Book #57 of 2020. Read August 14, 2020.

This is one of Michael’s early books all about the philosophical and physical aspects of gardening.

I always enjoy Michael’s writing. He has a lovely flow and tends towards longer, in-depth (maybe run on?) sentences with heavy usage of commas, semicolons, and dashes. These all appeal to the kind of writing that I lean towards; and if I ever became a great writer would certainly be reminiscent of my own writings.

In this book, Michael talks about his heavy forays into gardening on his own land. His biggest takeaway from this is:

“Another way of saying the same thing is that gardens are simultaneously real places and representations. They bring together, in one place, nature and our ideas about nature.”

While Americans are usually drawn to one of two extremes: degradation of land or non-utilization, Michael offers a third way. To take the idea of gardening and cultivation to work in union with nature.

“Gardening, as compared to lawn care, tutors us in nature’s ways, fostering an ethic of give-and-take with respect to the land. Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place.”

“The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.”

This book is a worthwhile read for any gardener.

Quotes:

“Even so, there is, I think, threading through this book…a single underlying argument: that the idea of a garden – as a place, both real and metaphorical, where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that can benefit both – may be as useful to us today as the idea of wilderness has been in the past.”

“Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common.”

“The lawn holds great appeal, especially to Americans. It looks sort of natural – it’s green; it grows – but in fact it represents a subjugation of the forest as utter and complete as a parking lot. Every species is forcibly excluded from the landscape but one, and this is forbidden to grow longer than the owner’s little finger. A lawn is nature on totalitarian rule.”

“Even my limited experience in the garden suggests that finding a good answer to that question will involve a much more complicated set of choices than the usual American alternatives, which seem to consist of either raping the land or sealing it away in a preserve where no one can touch it. That the first approach is bankrupt goes without saying. Yet, right as it sounds, the second one may be dead too.”

“The key to eliminating an insect from the garden is knowledge: about its habits, preferences, and vulnerabilities.”

“Biological controls won’t solve every pest problem – there are still too few of them, for one thing. But the approach holds promise, and suggests what can be accomplished when we learn to exploit nature’s self-knowledge, and stop thinking of our art and technology as being necessarily opposed to nature.”

“America has some 50,000 square miles of lawn under cultivation, on which we spend an estimated $30 billion a year – this according to the Lawn Institute, a Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, outfit devoted to publicizing the benefits of turf to Americans (surely a case of preaching to the converted).”

“And since the geography and climate of much of this country is poorly suited to turfgrasses (none of which are native), this can’t be accomplished without the tools of twentieth-century industrial civilization: its chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, machinery, and, often, computerized irrigation systems.”

“Lawns, I am convinced, are a symptom of, and a metaphor for, our skewed relationship to the land. They teach us that, with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stroke our hubris with regard to the land.”

“By World War II, most American farmers had been persuaded that all their crops needed in order to thrive were regular, heavy applications of fertilizer. To the farmer, however, the temptations of fertilizer pose something of a Faustian dilemma. At first, yields increase dramatically. But the cost is high, for the chemicals in fertilizer gradually kill off the biological activity in the soil and ruin its structure. Eventually, few organic nutrients remain, leaving crops completely dependent on fertilizer – the soil has become little more than a device to hold plants upright while they gorge themselves on 5-10-5. And to make matters worse, the more fertilizer he uses, the more problems the farmer has with disease and insects, since chemical fertilizer seems to weaken a plant’s resistance.”

“[H]e who cultivates a garden, and brings to perfection flowers and fruits, cultivates and advances at the same time his own nature.”

“People who blame their failures on ‘not having a green thumb’ (and they are legion) usually haven’t done their homework. Their is of course no such thing as a green thumb. Gardening is a vocation like any other – a calling, if you like, but not a gift from heaven. One acquires the necessary skills and knowledge to do it successfully, or one doesn’t.” – Eleanor Perényi.

“Here there is more every year, not less. Here it is ever early, never late.”

“‘To plant trees,’ Russell Page wrote in his memoir, ‘is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.’”

“This is the paradox faced by the Nature Conservancy and most other advocates of wilderness: at this point in history, creating a landscape that bears no marks of human intervention will require a certain amount of human intervention.”

“The only thing that’s really in danger of ending is a romantic, pantheistic idea of nature that we invented in the first place, one whose passing might well turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Useful as it has been in helping us protect the sacred 8 percent [of “wilderness” in the US], it nevertheless has failed to prevent us from doing a great deal of damage to the remaining 92 percent.”

“Nature is dead, if by nature we mean something that stands apart from man and messy history. And now that it is, perhaps we can begin to write some new parts for ourselves, ones that will show us how to start from here, not from some imagined state of innocence, and let us get down to the work at hand.”

“The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.”

“By narrowing the genetic base of our agriculture we have made it much more vulnerable and, in turn, more dependent on chemical defenses.”

“Another way of saying the same thing is that gardens are simultaneously real places and representations. They bring together, in one place, nature and our ideas about nature.”

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