Michael Pollan

Second Nature

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“One of the distinguished gardening books of our time,” from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (USA Today).
Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 75 greatest books ever written about gardening
After 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, from the renowned author of The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, and other bestsellers, 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.” —Annie Dillard
“A joy to read.” —Los Angeles Times
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335 printed pages
Publication year
2007
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Quotes

  • Amy Sapanhas quoted5 years ago
    What are my qualifications to write such a book? Certainly I am no expert—not on gardening, or nature, or much of anything else, for that matter. This is very much the enterprise of an amateur. My sole qualification (if it may be called that) is the wager I decided to make at the beginning of this project: that gardening might be worth taking seriously, and that, closely attended to, it might yield some good stories and helpful ideas. Yet I suspect that once I began to garden, this book was probably inevitable. As most gardeners will testify, the desire to make a garden is often followed by a desire to write down your experiences there—in a notebook, or a letter to a friend who gardens, or if, like me, you make your living by words, in a book. Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common. In my part of the country, there comes each year one long and occasionally fruitful season when gardening takes place strictly on paper and in the imagination. This book is how I’ve spent the last few such seasons in my garden

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