Second Nature

by Michael Pollan

What is cognitive dissonance?

When one summer I came across Emerson's argument that "weeds" (just then strangling my annuals) were nothing more than a defect of my perception, I felt a certain cognitive dissonance.

Second Nature, by Michael Pollan, is about the cognitive dissonance between nature and culture; it is about the philosophy of gardening, and it is about compromise. It is, maybe, the best book I've ever been disappointed in.

Pollan begins with some entertaining stories about his father's relationship to that great American nature-culture boundary, the lawn. (His father didn't like mowing, and his father's neighbors didn't care for the result.) He continues using his own experiences in the garden as a jumping off point: he plants a tree, and meanders entertainingly about what trees mean to us today; about what they meant to the settlers in 1500; about the hope implicit in planting a tree; about the politics of trees in Revolutionary England and in Israel today. He discusses the "moral imperatives of compost." He purchases 6 old-fashioned roses, and talks about roses and history, roses and social class, roses and sex. Sex?

Could I be imagining things? Well, consider some of the other names by which this rose is known: Virginale, Incarnata, La Seduisante, and... Cuisse de Nymphe Emue, which she demurs from translating. But there it is: the thigh of an aroused nymph.

Yes he uses words like trope and synedoche and cognitive dissonance, but I think we need to examine our lives occasionally and find those things there, and his examination of gardening is well thought. Ultimately, Pollan sees gardening as a sort of link or compromise between nature and culture:

Gardens... teach the necessary if un-American lesson that nature and culture can be compromised, that there might be some middle ground between the lawn and the forest - between those who would complete the conquest of the planet in the name of progress, and those who believe it's time we abdicated our rule and left the earth in the care of its more innocent species.

The idea of a garden - as a place, both real and metaphorical, where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that can benefit both - may be as useful to us today as the idea of wilderness has been in the past.

Well I think this is an excellent idea, but I was disappointed that Pollan made so little mention of some of its variations. He could hardly cite Noah's Garden by Sara Stein, since that wasn't written when this was published, but he gives only a token bow to Aldo Leopold and his ideas of land stewardship, and makes no significant mention of the restoration movement, that reflects these ideas on a slightly wilder scale. I was also a touch disappointed that Pollan plants purple loosestrife and Norway maples with no apparent qualms; a minor thing, maybe, but in the compromise between nature and culture, loosestrife (an invasive wetland weed, actually outlawed in some states) falls too close to the side of culture for my tastes.

Still, if the questions are more important than the answers, then this is a witty and excellent book. Suggestions for compromises with nature are, to me, welcome from any source. We can't eliminate freeways, but why not plant the roadsides in native prairie, instead of endless bluegrass? I just prefer, in my own garden, to shade things a touch more towards nature that Pollan does.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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