Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

Copertina anteriore
Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, 1 dic 2007 - 320 pagine
“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

Dall'interno del libro

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Sommario

INTRODUCTION
1
TWO GARDENS
7
Spring
14
NATURE ABHORS A GARDEN
37
WHY MOW?
54
COMPOST AND ITS MORAL IMPERATIVES
66
Summer
77
INTO THE ROSE GARDEN 79
79
GREEN THUMB
117
Fall
134
THE HARVEST
137
PLANTING A TREE
150
THE IDEA OF A GARDEN
176
Winter
203
MADE WILD BY POMPOUS CATALOGS
205
Copyright

WEEDS ARE US
98

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Pagina 95 - Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality and say, This is, and no mistake...
Pagina 162 - The axe leaps! The solid forest gives fluid utterances, They tumble forth, they rise and form, Hut, tent, landing, survey, Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade, Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, jamb, lath, panel, gable...
Pagina 108 - Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.
Pagina 59 - It is unchristian," he declared, "to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.
Pagina 142 - That all is clean, forever and forever. That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the orangeorchard— that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Pagina 102 - Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Pagina 246 - Clipt hedges, avenues, regular platforms, strait canals have been for some time very properly exploded. There is not a citizen who does not take more pains to torture his acre and half into irregularities, than he formerly would have employed to make it as formal as his cravat.
Pagina 108 - How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with...
Pagina 224 - The greatest service which can be rendered any country is, to add a useful plant to its culture, especially a bread grain ; next in value to bread is oil.

Informazioni sull'autore (2007)

Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire and the prize-winning A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder. In 1991, he received the QPB New Visions prize for Second Nature, which was also chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the seventy-five greatest books ever written about gardening. He is currently the editor of Modern Library’s gardening series and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.

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