Pollan: gardener

De tuiner als metafoor: 

“Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself...
But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can't manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it...
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.”

Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardner's Education

zie ook Inspiring Quotes about Gardening, Nature, and Life

Pollan beschrijft zijn leerschool in de tuin. Hij constateert dat er twee tuinen zijn: “de ene min of meer denkbeeldig, de andere opdringerig echt”. (9)

This book is the story of my education in the garden. The garden in question is actually two, one more or less imaginary, the other insistently real. The first is the garden of books and memories, that dreamed-of outdoor utopia, gnat-free and ever in bloom, where nature answers to our wishes and we imagine feeling perfectly at home. The second garden is an actual place, consisting of the five acres of rocky, intractable hillside in the town of Cornwall, Connecticut, that I have been struggling to cultivate for the past seven years. Much separates these two gardens, though every year I bring them a little more closely into alignment (p. 1).

Voor het gratis eerste hoofdstuk: Second Nature: A Gardener's Education: Michael Pollan: 9780802140111: Amazon.com: Books

Pollan realiseert zich dat hij geen tuinier kan worden zonder ook iets te leren over zijn plaats in de natuur. Of ruimer: over de relatie mens-natuur. Vandaag is de tuin voor hem de plek om daarover iets te leren.

Both of these gardens have had a lot to teach me, and not only, as it turned out, about gardening. For I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before I'd also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature (was I within my rights to murder the woodchuck that had been sacking my vegetable garden all spring?); about the somewhat peculiar attitudes toward the land that an American is born with (why is it the neighbors have taken such a keen interest in the state of my lawn?); about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, the moral implications of landscape design, and several other questions that the wish to harvest a few decent tomatoes had not prepared me for. It may be my nature to complicate matters unduly, to search for large meanings in small things, but it did seem that there was a lot more going on in the garden than I'd expected to find. (Polland, Second Nature, Amazon.com: Books).