Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

Michael Pollan brilliantly promotes the garden - rather than the wild - as the most appropriate place for rethinking our relationship with nature. Second Nature contains plenty of information - there are chapters on the virtues of composting, how to plant a tree for the long haul, reading between the lines of seed catalogues, and the secrets of the green thumb - but its true focus is the philosophy of gardening, what gardening has to teach us about the troubled borders between nature and culture, our attitudes towards wild places and animals, the urgent environmental questions we face, class consciousness in the gardening world and the moral dimensions of landscape.