Most gardeners, when they get to the typewriter, are either practical-minded (how-to books) or deliriously lyrical. Pollan, who has read his share of this stuff, points out that even the best (Eleanor Perenyi, Henry Mitchell, Vita Sackville-West) get so wrapped up in their subject that they can’t stop long enough to tell you what their gardens look like. Perhaps because he’s only been at it seriously for about seven years, Pollan can still remember that there are readers of intelligence and curiosity whose gardening habits amount to no more than a stroll through the yard every month or so to see what’s died.
Nor has he lost sight of the urge that got him into gardening (“I wanted something … like my grandfather’s garden, a place where I could put my hands on the land and make it do things … I wanted to dig”). Whether planting a Norway maple on his rural Connecticut acreage or browsing through seed catalogs, Pollan never forgets that he is party to a basic transaction. “What I’m making here is a middle ground between nature and culture, a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically set against it; what I’m making is a garden.”
Telescoping his seven years of labor into one, Pollan arranges his book to correspond with the gardener’s year. He prepares his ground, he plants, he tends, he harvests and then he gets ready to do it all again. The notion that a gardener’s work is never done is music to this high achiever’s ears. After harvesting a pathetic crop of carrots, knobbly as an old man’s knuckles, he knows no rest until he’s yanking up sleek orange beauties. The same with battling woodchucks, laying out a flower garden and finding the right crop for that boggy spot where nothing will grow (raspberries were the answer).
For long stretches in this book Pollan is so sober and fair-minded you just want to slug him. Now and then he’ll crack a joke, as when, by way of explaining his distaste for manicured suburban lawns, he describes his father, a first-class lawn hater and “strictly an indoor dad, moving around the house in his year-round uniform of button-down shirt, black socks and tie shoes, and boxer shorts.” But after a while even the comic bits start seeming like the preacher’s warm-up jokes, complete with those familiar little transitions to the Big Point (“And so, like the boy in the story, we too must learn . . .”). Failing to fully integrate his anecdotes with his argument, however, is a failure of style not substance. When he’s critiquing our relationship to nature, Pollan is uncommonly sensible.
The garden, he points out, is that marginal area between civilization and wilderness where we have learned to use nature without abusing it. As such, it makes a perfect spot from which to begin breaking our “deeply ingrained habit of seeing nature and culture as irreconcilably opposed.” It won’t do, Pollan argues, to leave well enough alone while Yellowstone burns down in the meantime. Dubious experiments with pesticides and vulnerable hybrids have persuaded gardeners not to quit but to be more responsible, more humble and ultimately more successful. Surely the wilderness deserves the same care and attention we give our tomato plants.
