prairie point

I own tons of books about “plants” and a decent selection of books about “landscaping” but I’ve never dug as deep as I would like into the literature of “gardening.” When Carol started her book club for Garden Bloggers, I hoped that I might remedy this. Unfortunately I’ve mostly been disappointed by what I’ve read.

I thought Michael Pollan’s book Second Nature might be an exception. I read and was delighted by The Botany of Desire several years ago, and have also enjoyed his occasional articles in the New York Times and elsewhere. I put this book on my “desired” list at the online book exchange I use, and by a happy coincidence it showed up in my mail box just as it was announced as the month’s selection for Garden Bloggers.

Pollan is certainly a very witty and clever wordsmith. His accounts of early gardening experiences via his father and grandfather never failed to entertain, as did his channeling of Elmer Fudd in the chapter wherein he fights off garden pests with a firebomb. You could think of it as an updated version of “Green Acres” in which a naive city boy moves to the country to get in touch with nature. What gardener won’t laugh out loud at his commentary on seed catalogs and sympathize with his struggle with weeds in the wildflower meadow? I think the book might have been more satisfying if it had just stayed at that level.

Instead he tries to turn serious on us but never really shakes off the cartoonery. His contrast of nature versus culture is entirely too simplistic and “black and white.” Somewhere there is probably a person who claims rights for trees, but that view is hardly representative of the conservation movement. Pollan devotes a chapter to a controversy between the Nature Conservancy and a local community over a tract called “Cathedral Pines,” but never even tells the Conservancy’s side of the issue.

Consequently the concept of garden-tending put forth as a middle way between the extremes is not a well thought-through conservation ethic. Pollan seems to think that all will be well if we each tend our own plot of land the way he tends his. That’s just a kinder and gentler form of land domination. For a good critique of this side of the book, check out the link in my previous post.

In short amusing and entertaining, but not as insightful as later stuff of his that I’ve read.