Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
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Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

3.9 of 5 stars 3.90  ·  rating details  ·  1,715 ratings  ·  291 reviews
More than eight years ago, Harper's editor Michael Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm. He planted a garden and adopted Thoreau's viewpoint: Do not impose your will upon the wilderness, the woodchucks or the weeds. Here is his timely meditation and social history on man's relationship with nature and the environment.
Paperback, 258 pages
Published August 12th 2003 by Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (first published 1991)
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Silent Spring by Rachel CarsonThe Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael PollanA Sand County Almanac by Aldo LeopoldDesert Solitaire by Edward AbbeyThe Lorax by Dr. Seuss
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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 4,058)
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Rachel
Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars
I am an unabashed fan of Michael Pollan. Yes, it may sound strange, but in my esteem, he is tantamount to a rock star or a Hollywood A-lister. "But Rachel!" you may be thinking, "he's just a regular guy! In fact, he's just a bald and bespectacled ol' college professor!"

Despite these potentially legitimate arguments, I classify Michael Pollan among the ranks of the elite. So, when I learned that Michael Pollan published a book about gardening in the early 1990'...more
Ken-ichi
All Pollan's books explore the ways people relate to the world around them, from plants to food in general to space itself. This one's about gardens and gardening, and is probably the book in which he most explicitly addresses man's relationship to nature.

The oft-repeated thesis of this book is that all American concepts of the physical world and our place in it stress a division between nature and culture, and that while this notion has been useful in its various forms (Puritan esta...more
Mads P.
A fascinating and informative read that goes way beyond gardening. Drawing from history, ecology, religion, literature, and philosophy, Pollan discusses how gardening addresses our relationship with nature.

Excellent writing style. For example, he entertainingly describes "the loathsome slugs: naked bullets of flesh--evicted snails--that hide from the light of day, emerging at sunset to cruise the garden along their own avenues of slime."

In addition to the lowly ...more
Ammie
Ammie rated it 5 of 5 stars
There are so many books I want to give four and a half stars to, books that are way better than a four--my fallback rating--but not quite as mind-blowing as a five. This is one of those. It's a collection of essays about gardening, but along the way it touches on everything from rose-growing snobbery (I'm a florist, and since I read this many people have received an impromptue lecture on hybrid vs. old variety roses)to how to negotiate the nature-culture split in a mindful way both in and out ...more
Nick
Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars
Although I am not a gardener--I joke that I have a black thumb, I do understand the attraction and love to walk through communal gardens and so forth. In this early book, Michael Pollan, known now for his two bestsellers on food (one reviewed by me), writes about gardening, the idea of gardens and the false dichotomy we make between nature and culture. A wise, thoughtful book that seems to me to reflect the attitude we need to deal with our environmental problems, from invasive species to glob...more
Keith
Keith rated it 5 of 5 stars
I like Michael Pollan, even when I sometimes disagree with him a bit, particularly in his lack of concern, at least at the time he wrote Second Nature, with invasive plants... I guess living in Connecticut he's never seen kudzu up close and personal? Anyway, Second Nature is about gardening, and the way gardening, and our ideas about gardens, interplay with our ideas about nature and conservation. Pollan takes umbrage both at those who would level and pave all green spaces, but also at those w...more
Cortney
This was written back in '91, before Pollan came into his current status as a food ethics heavy hitter. I have read several of his more recent works- In Defense of Food, among others- and it was refreshing to read this book and compare his earlier work with his more recent. For one, I didn't realize he was such a beautiful prose writer. Nowadays he talks often of ethics and moral frameworks and principles of eating, and fleshing out his philosophy has given his writing a more "kindly profes...more
NJMetal
"Second Nature" is Michael Pollan's first book (and the last of all his offerings to date that I have read.) It is a book of the author's attempt to more deeply understand his connection to his gardens on his (now former) property in rural Connecticut.
The story travels from his boyhood exposure and fascination to his grandfather's suburban garden. It all culminates in a tour of his own gardens as an adult. Along that form he discusses the many stops we all take in our own gard...more
Elizabeth Wright Korytkowski
Wow- very interesting read. While I thought that this would fall into my normal 'story-telling, environmentally aware' non-fiction, what I came to discover is that it is much more.

While I started out having a hard time getting into this book, by about 1/3 of the way through, I'd reset my expectations and came to find it truly enlightening and thought-provoking. It is much more than just non-fiction; it is philosophy about man's role in the natural world, couched amongst personal encou...more
gina
This book was, erm, okay. Just okay. There were definitely parts that I really liked about it (historical overview of gardening in the US, Pollan talking about his struggles with his five acres, reminiscing about his childhood gardening memories). But, and this is a big but, each chapter felt like it's own book, with a wrap up that left me feeling like SURELY this should be the end of the book, only to realize there were a gazzillion cds left in the case to go through. When I put in the last one...more
Bill
Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: non-fiction
This is one of Pollan's earlier books and it is fun to see his early thinking, ideas leading eventually to Botany of Desire (co-evolution) and his other books. This one looks at gardening and explores it as a useful metaphor for breaking the dichotomy between Preserving Nature (i.e. pretending that we are separate from nature and can wall it off from human influence) and dominating our environment (i.e. pretending that we can control it without ultimately destroying ourselves). He doesn't dwell ...more
Nomad
Nomad rated it 4 of 5 stars
Yep, another garden writing book, for the woman who kills plants with the power of her gaze. Oh well... I'm just going to go along with my addiction... why fight it?

Micheal Pollan is a genius and while he's more well known these days for his part in the U.S. for food activism and helping to jumpstart the 'Real food revolution', this was his first book and it's about his garden.

I really enjoyed it and found him to be a fairly sarcastic voice in a genre full of pastoral, ...more
jeremy
michael pollan may be incapable of uninteresting writing. discerning and lucid, his works tend to provoke the reader to engage themselves (at least in thought, if not deed) well beyond the final page. second nature: a gardener's education is pollan's first book (now nearly two decades old), yet reads like a timeless work by a seasoned writer. while lacking in the overall cohesive force of his later works, this book may encourage more reflection and greater perspective. with his characteristi...more
Paul
Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars
One of Pollan's earlier titles, I started reading this because for the first time I was to create and tend to my own little 10x10 garden this year. I figured having another perspective on this would be nice.

The book follows Pollan's own thoughts and musings on gardening in America. The main theme is that too often there are extremes in the environmental debate. Either we steadfastly preserve "wilderness" or we bulldoze the forest and put up condos. Pollan puts forth the ide...more
David
David rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: Anyone interested in gardening.
This book may not change forever the way you think about food, but I enjoyed reading it more than Mr Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. He starts off with stories of childhood experiences relating to gardening and quickly moves on to topics such as the angst of the suburban lawn, the ethics of composting, and the concepts of weeds, alien species and cultivation. He gradually builds up to his theme of gardening as a metaphor for how we view the natural world.

...it should be acknowled...more
Peter
If only I had a farm.
Margot
Finished--FINALLY! If I had been reading Second Nature: A Gardener's Education in print, instead of listening to it on audio, I probably would have set it down in order to move on to something more interesting. Unfortunately, I must add Second Nature to the pile of, what I perceive to be, rather boring Pollan books, joining company with The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. (Please note that I consider The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto...more
Nicki
Nicki rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: garden, 2010, non-fiction
One of my summer reading goals is to read through all of Michael Pollan’s work; so I started with Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, his first book, which was published in 1991.

Second Nature takes readers through the explorations, tribulations, and revelations of Pollan himself, as he works to leave his mark on his personal landscape. This is not a “how-to” garden book. Here you will not find natural remedies for warding off common garden pests, or how to produce more tomatoes ...more
Christy B
This is Pollan's first book & you can tell-- in a good way. Instead of being a thesis-driven, repetitive argument for a lifestyle we probably already agree with (In Defense of Food, Omnivore's Dilemma), Second Nature is much more of a pleasant exploration. He discusses his successes and follies in gardening fruits, veggies, flowers, trees, even plain old grass. He uses his own personal history and experience and supplements it with a bit of US/world history to explain what has shaped our attitud...more
Patti
Patti rated it 5 of 5 stars
What a great book. Not only did I discover several new garden supply stores, but I also was awakened to the oddity of the all encompassing front yards of grass throughout the US and how that came to be and how hard it is to break away from the tyranny to conform to it.

Pollan discusses the conflict between having a garden and allowing the weeds and creatures to live their lives and how we actually act as weeds ourselves in changing the landscape around us.
"Native grasses p...more
Carley
Carley rated it 3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: intellectual gardeners
A very heavy book about gardening - history, philosophy, ethics. Especially liked the bits about letting nature do it's thing versus our inevitable effect we have on nature. To weed or not to weed ~
Julian
Julian rated it 4 of 5 stars
In order to feed my new addiction to the chaos and and "ambition graveyard" that is our giant, 1/2 acre backyard, I needed some intelligent reflection about what a garden might mean, and what it might mean to interact with nature in this way. I'm no way adept at growing things or the science of plants, and yet I've been finding an incredible amount of fulfillment from my minor efforts in the garden this year. And Pollan, through stories and precision, and a good degree of depth concern...more
Alex Tomlinson
Quintessential Micheal Pollan. He dips in and out of theory and fact, experience and his musings about them; drawing profound and insightful moral and ethical ideas from the quotidian. Its a calm and eloquently expressive precis of a year in life in a real gardener with a lifetime worth of lessons. Anyone who can dwell on and intelligently pick apart the gospel of Thoreau is worth reading. More philosophical and less political than Pollan's more recent works. You can see how it laid the fou...more
Aubrey
Aubrey rated it 3 of 5 stars
When I first started this book, I was absolutely in love with it. It was beautifully written and the first chapter read like a memoir which recalled to mind my own childhood spent in my grandfather's garden. As the book progressed, I kept waiting for a theme or a message to emerge but it never came. Additionally, the book was marred for me by several scientific inaccuracies. They are small details, but as someone who studies and teaches about the Earth for a living, I couldn't get beyond the...more
Gretchen
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Tom
I am not a gardener, but I enjoyed this book as much as any Pollan work - and I really love his books. This book, like his others, is broader in scope than the title may suggest. Seemingly standing at his elbow as he tills the soil of his own garden we get the history of arboriculture, that of more specific cultivars, the philosophies evident in seed catalogs, the morality/efficacy of weeding and fighting pests, and more. A somewhat wistful but overall informative and enlightenting work.

...more
Tom
I am not a gardener, but I enjoyed this book as much as any Pollan work - and I really love his books. This book, like his others, is broader in scope than the title may suggest. Seemingly standing at his elbow as he tills the soil of his own garden we get the history of arboriculture, that of more specific cultivars, the philosophies evident in seed catalogs, the morality/efficacy of weeding and fighting pests, and more. A somewhat wistful but overall informative and enlightenting work.

...more
Gary
Gary rated it 4 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: Yes
Recommended to Gary by: gardner, Environmentalist
I’m not a gardener, so why did I pick up this book? Only because it’s a Michael Pollan book and I’m a fanboy of his. At first the book was boring, I mean I just not a gardener. Yet as the book went on I found it more and more interesting. As a someone working on getting his “Bachelor of Science in Environmental Policy and Management” I found the environmental stuff very interesting. By the end of the book I wanted to go out and get my hands dirty. I wanted to plain not only a vegetable garden bu...more
Patricia
Patricia rated it 3 of 5 stars
Recommended to Patricia by: Susan
I love Michael Pollan's writing, but one of the things I love about it was the very thing that made this book so hard to finish. Pollan's writing style is dense and thoughtful. This can be a good thing when one is in the mood to read a dense and thoughtful text, but sometimes his observations can go on. I would have been better off owning this book, so I could pick it up and put it down intermittantly over a large amount of time. However, I requested it from the library which meant my time with ...more
Juliet Wilson
Juliet Wilson rated it 5 of 5 stars
Shelves: nature
Subtitled A Gardener's Education, this book really deserves to be considered a modern classic in the field of gardening and environmental thinking. It's a beautifully written and engaging look at gardening, taking in the definition of gardens, their history and culture, the importance of the lawn to the North American identity, gardening philosophy and the social insights given by seed catalogues. It is also thought provoking about the relationship of the gardener with the wider natural world an...more
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Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.
More about Michael Pollan...
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Food Rules: An Eater's Manual A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

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“Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
5 people liked it
“The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.” 4 people liked it
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