Second Nature by Michael Pollan

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan
Blackstone Audio, 2009 (book originally published in 1991)
8 discs, unabridged

This truly is an excellent book, deserving of the accolades it has received over the years (yes, I can even see how it might be considered "a new literary classic" as the blurb on Goodreads would have it.) It also fits quite nicely into my pattern of waiting until the garden is safely under snow before getting excited about gardening again, usually at the impetus of a book like this. I didn't agree with everything this book offers - I'll get to my objections in a moment - but I loved that I was challenged by it without being shamed, and that I can feel, even at the end, that though I do disagree with at least one of Pollan's fundamental points, this book is still incredibly valuable and powerful and necessary. Perhaps I feel this so strongly even because I disagree with it.

It starts out as a seemingly simple, straightforward gardening memoir, though Pollan tells us right off where we're going, and straightforward gardening memoir is not it. I think I would have enjoyed it even if it had stuck to that. What lifts it above, however, is that Pollan transitions between gardening memoir to philosophical tract to history to manifesto, in and out, often all four things in the same chapter. And while that might sound like an awful lot of weight for a single gardening book to bear, Pollan writes so well that we move seamlessly from philosophy to history to personal anecdote to ethics to practical gardening info without blinking. One rarely feels weighed down, even when Pollan is talking about something as weighty as the history of landscape design in Western culture or the culture of the rose, largely because of the author's enthusiasm for the subject and his wry sense of humour. Pollan is fascinated by each subject he turns his pen to; the reader (or listener, in my case) is drawn along for the ride.

Even though he's very United States-centric (this is fair) and this book was originally published in 1991, I think Pollan's argument that we need a new environmental ethic is a very pertinent one in this decade and particularly in this country. I agree with him that the paradigms we have operated under have failed us as we operate as stewards of this planet. He suggests the "wilderness ethic" that requires complete isolation of wild places, an entirely hands-off approach, a la Thoreau, has lead us to believe that anything that is not untouched wilderness is therefore fair game for development of whatever sort we happen to feel we need, generally things like roads and suburbs. There is no middle ground. He proposes a "garden ethic" as the middle ground, a way towards a "second nature" in which human culture and wild nature can coexist, where the dichotomy of culture vs. nature no longer applies. He argues persuasively that generally gardeners already practice this garden ethic, even if they themselves don't recognize it as such.

Each chapter in the book essentially goes to reinforce this argument in one way or another. I found that the chapter in which he discusses ecological restoration to be particularly edifying; I could clearly and absolutely see his point, and found that I agreed with him more than I thought I did.

Where he did lose me, at first, and where I still disagree with him, is in his interpretation of naturalists and the wilderness. He argues that naturalists are too romantically engaged with the idea of wilderness, are too hands-off, are too anti-culture to accept that some human activity in the wilderness can be a good thing and might be a necessary thing. We are too blindly protective of our wild spaces, even to the detriment of the wild space. (He also suggests, a couple of times, that naturalists are lazy gardeners - this point, I am afraid, at least in my own experience I must concede, though in my grandmother's case I take issue.) He rails against wilderness - non-garden green spaces - as trying to encroach on human space, in fact setting up the sort of dichotomy he speaks against: nature is constantly trying to take back her own, in an indifferent, entropic sort of way. He suggests, in one of the earliest chapters, that no wild forest could ever have taught him as much about nature as his grandfather's garden did as a child.

To this I would suggest that Pollan just didn't have the right teachers, or the right role-models, for understanding how to learn from a wilderness. Were his eyes open to the right sorts of things, a forest has an awful lot to teach, has an incredible amount of value to humans. If you can walk through the forest like I can, and my mother, and my grandmother, and the way my grandfather did, and see and identify birds, and see and identify the various plants, insects, mammal tracks, lichens - if you can do this, you are never at a loss for something to learn. Every walk is different, each minute brings something new. (This is why I cannot really go for a hike for exercise purposes; I stop every few minutes to look at something.) And there is something valuable about going into a place with the mindset that doesn't involve "how do I put my human stamp on this, how do I change it [for the better]." This is not, in contrast to Pollan's suggestions, a lazy way to view nature. In fact, I think for many, it's harder to realize the patient openness of the naturalist's perspective than it is to go in and try to "fix" things.

That said, I get what Pollan is trying to say: that most landscapes, green or wild or otherwise, bear the stamp of human interference, and we'd do better to reconcile ourselves to interfering than to locking nature away to be something we only go visit on weekends, otherwise we're going to lose it entirely. I agree with that, fundamentally. I agree that wildlife management is probably necessary both for human enjoyment and for the good of the species involved. Pollan maybe should acknowledge a little louder that we don't always get it right, with our management techniques - Asian Ladybeetles, anyone? - but on the other hand, I agree too with the premise that basically what we're doing is managing nature in order to keep the planet habitable and pleasant for ourselves. Otherwise we're going to squeeze ourselves right out of this place. And the planet will do just fine once we're gone, keeping on keeping on, in the way it does. Pollan's point of view is unabashedly anthropocentric, whereas I think mine leans a little further towards viewing the species we share the planet with as having a right to exist for their own sake and not just ours, but we share a lot of common ground. In the spirit of his garden ethic, I think there's places to meet in the middle where we can come to compromises that don't devalue either point of view.

The audio is well-produced, though the CD breaks are at weird spots; but maybe it's just me who notices when a chapter starts and then a paragraph later you have to switch the CD? At any rate, Pollan reads the book himself, and is a good reader. It's nice to hear the words spoken the way the author intended them to sound. He's got a dryly humourous, self-deprecating way of reading that I think probably plays up those aspects of the text, and it works really well. Though he's serious about what he's saying, it never devolves into pedantry or self-important schlock. I wondered a time or two if reading the book would have felt like more of a slog than listening did.

As you can tell, lots of fodder for discussion and thought here. You don't have to be a gardener to enjoy this book, but you might find yourself curious to try growing something yourself. And even if you don't think that will ever happen, I think this is a valuable piece of writing as an effort to establish new ground, new ways of thinking and talking about humans and the environment. If it is so ambitious that it sometimes misses its mark, at least it tries. A brave book, and a necessary one.

Garden Making magazine

Okay. So this blog is called "a book a week." Let's just say for the sake of argument that books are anything with printed material, otherwise I'm not going to be able to keep up my most excellent streak of posting once a week. I've had a lot of trouble staying with anything longer than a magazine article over the past couple of weeks. I do have a couple of books I'm working on, which may or may not get finished for review: Lauren Chattman's Bread Making, the second Cardcaptor Sakura omnibus volume, Karen Armstrong's Twelve Steps to Compassion, E. M. Forster's A Room With a View. All of these have various things to recommend them, but I'm having a hard time finding the energy when I have the time to read much. Even a graphic novel, you'll notice.

But this is all okay, because I have Garden Making. This is a Canadian magazine, and it's an excellent magazine. It's got all the lovely garden and flower photos, but additionally it has interesting, meaty articles. There are garden profiles, plant profiles, design articles, gardening columns, how-tos, book reviews, tool profiles, and so on. For my money this is the best home and garden magazine on the market, and I flip through plenty of them.

My favourite thing? The articles are long, sometimes several pages, so there's depth and space for thought and interest. I like that it's not a list of things I need to buy to have for my garden or to complete my life, nor is it a series of chirpy tips that bear little resemblance to my gardening experience or that I've already heard/seen many many other places, nor reams of lists of things without context or sufficient information to make them relevant. The writing is excellent by and large, and the photography plentiful and pretty. And the layout! It's not confusing or distracting -- it's clear, perhaps a little staid, but it bears more resemblance to something like The Atlantic than other home and garden magazines I've seen and I like that. It's a magazine I can take seriously and read comfortably, without sacrificing attractiveness.

I don't have many subscriptions. Well, at this point I only have Garden Making. I used to have others, but this quarterly publication is the one I most look forward to and the one I can't let lapse. It's not an old magazine, it's only been around for a couple of years and I believe I've been subscribing since it's fourth issue. But I definitely hope it will stay around longer, so I can read more of Patrick Lima's plant profiles (the spring edition has a big article on peonies by him: I vacuumed it up and went back for a second reading), and Judith Adams' design suggestions, and Lorraine Flanagan's interviews.

Recommended for gardeners or people who wish they had a garden. Its relevance is Canada-wide, and certainly extends to the northern States as well. It's by far the most useful and most pleasurable gardening reading I do these days. It's so refreshing to see such a gorgeous, fat print magazine in these days of internet and e-readers; I hope they can continue to be profitable so I can enjoy it for years to come.

Japanese Gardening by Charles Chesshire, photos by Alex Ramsay

Japanese Gardening

by Charles Chesshire, photos by Alex Ramsay

Aquamarine, 2006

160 pages

It must be late January. Every year, like clockwork, the seed catalogues come and we have a few gorgeous, somewhat warm sunny days (which soon tilt back into frigidly appropriate dead-of-winter temperatures), and I start to feel the draw of the garden again. January is far too early to start planting even the earliest seeds indoors around here. I've got at least until mid-March before I dare to attempt that. So the next best thing is garden books, and I expect there will be a smattering of them from here on out until I'm actually out in the garden in the sun and soil.

I've always really liked the traditional Japanese garden ethic. I didn't know anything about it, really, except that there is something I appreciate instinctively about it. So this book, with its absolutely gorgeous cover and beginner attitude, appealed to me strongly when it came back across the desk.

Having not read any Japanese gardening books before, this appears to me to be a good entry into the aesthetic. It's very basic in some ways, although it's not at all a basic gardening book. There is an understanding that you, as a reader, have gardened before in a Western style, probably for a while, and are now turning your sights towards designing a Japanese-style garden. It's hard to say whether or not it fulfills its purpose, as I don't have the kind of space, time, or (most important) restraint to implement almost any of the ideas in this book. Generally, these are big gardens for big properties, and only a very few ideas for smaller gardens were briefly touched on. Which in a way is odd, because it's not like most Japanese gardeners have acres of space to play with.

As garden porn, it fulfills its purpose -- the photos are beautiful, and the layout of the book itself is very pretty. As garden erotica, perhaps not so much -- I was left wanting quite a lot more. I was lead to believe, for example, that there would be some discussion of contemporary Japanese gardening, and there were perhaps one or two glancing blows, mostly in captions of photographs. Along the same lines, there were sometimes photographs that were very incompletely explained; one caption discusses a photograph of a "bandaged" pine, which was probably very symbolic and/or functional, but there was nothing at all in the text to explain anything about it.

Done well, on the other hand, was a good chronology of design styles and a good explanation of design influences through history. It wasn't in-depth, but it was good enough that I now know I want to know more, and could at least name and explain a little bit about the four traditional Japanese garden styles and where they came from. Also, while Chesshire explains the design ethic, he touches often on the fact that to really understand the Japanese garden, one needs to understand the spiritual influences and not just the hard design. I think that's probably very important for Western gardeners to at least acknowledge as a major part of a Japanese garden, when attempting to design one of their own; Chesshire feels the same.

Also good were the glossary and plant lists. The bibliography was very small, which was a bit of a disappointment.

Overall, far too brief, I think, but nice to look at and a fine entry point for someone interested but not committed to the traditional Japanese garden. It was enough for me to recognize that while I appreciate the ideas, they really won't work for me. Not at this point in my gardening life, anyways. I don't have enough restraint. I love my flowers and my colours and my scents. The search for my own garden design ethic continues...

Grow Great Grub by Gayla Trail

I'm not done with the gardening books, not by a long shot. Gayla Trail (of yougrowgirl.com and the beginner gardening book You Grow Girl which I thought was good with minor caveats) has written a new book, entitled Grow Great Grub. It's about growing edibles organically, and no matter what your space constraints. I had it on hold at the library, got about halfway through it, and then decided to buy it. I've got my own little copy here beside me now. It's that fabulous, and I can see using it again and again, right up there with my favourite gardening book of all time, Patrick Lima's The Organic Home Garden.

First of all, this book is gorgeous. The pictures are lovely and the layout is both attractive and easy to follow. Just looking at the cover makes me want to get out into the garden. But it's not just the photographs, either -- the text gets my gardening fingers itching. This is something I appreciate in a gardening book: it doesn't overwhelm, confuse, or make me feel hopeless. It gets me excited about trying new things, or about trying again things I did last year that didn't work out the first time. (Actually, it's a very rare garden book that convinces me to give spectacularly failed experiments a second shot.)

It's organized in such a way that it's easy to find the information I need. One of the not-overwhelming parts is that Trail doesn't drown the gardener in information; there is enough, but for super-detailed info like specific planting depths or spacing, or long lists of varietals this might not be the best book. The thing is, I have discovered that, after three summers of attempting a vegetable garden with varied results, I don't need or want excessive detail. I can get the detail I need from the seed packet. The information I want is of the more general sort, anyways. I wish someone had been a little more clear, for example, on how damn difficult winter squash can be to grow instead of going on about specific varieties and finding disease resistant ones. Reading the section on squash, both winter and summer, made me realize that it's not actually as easy as my grandmother makes it look. Again, rather than frightening me off, Trail's little section on squash made me want to try again, this time forewarned and forearmed. I've got some small, easy tips to try out, including a suggestion not to worry about the male flowers all dying before any of the female flowers actually bloom. And how to give my squash a better chance against powdery mildew. I'm still not going to expect ten beautiful buttercup squash. I will be satisfied if I get any. And I might even try frying up some of those early male flowers at Trail's suggestion, if I can bring myself to steal them from the bees.

As with You Grow Girl, there are little projects stuck throughout the book, from making a teatowel storage bag for produce to making a self-watering container out of plastic bins to planting potatoes in a garbage can to recipes. I want to try nearly all of them. The entire last section of the book is about the harvest. There are ways to preserve the harvest, and yet again, it's not overwhelming, it's encouraging. Simple things like how to best freeze food, or how to can it. This is stuff that may be second nature to my grandmother, but aside from my yearly forays into new types of jelly, I'm pretty clueless.

But the best thing about this book, for my money, comes in the form of Trail's encouragement of and tips about growing food in containers. We have three little vegetable garden beds. This will be the first year that I'm not planning to dig another one, or enlarge any of them. The one that lends itself to enlargement is currently planted up with garlic, so I'm not even going to bother this year. So, if I want a larger variety of veggies than I can fit in my three little beds, I'm going to be growing in containers.

Trail makes this so easy. The second section of the book is called "The Plants" and as advertised, there is a page or two for each grouping of edibles (ie. root vegetables, leafy greens, beans, brassicas, etc.). And in each section, in a little box, is some information on growing plants from that group in a container. Each box includes general tips, suitability of the plant for container growing as high, medium, or low (but nothing is off-limits for container growing, as far as Trail is concerned), a suggested minimum depth for the container, suggested varieties best suited for containers, and any additional things a container farmer might need to know. This may seem a small thing, but it is excellent. I am feeling confident that I can try some of this in a much more organized and hopefully successful way than I managed last year.

There's a lot more to this book than I've managed to discuss. It is going to be useful throughout the seasons, including winter with the projects I can see trying. I highly, highly recommend it for anyone interested in food gardening, even and maybe especially if you don't think it's something you could ever do. It's budget-conscious, helpful, and enthusiastic; and the best part is, you really don't have to have a backyard. Even a sunny window can grow at least some tasty things and Grow Great Grub will help you do so. Now excuse me while I go stare at the seeds I have been trying to sprout.

The Passionate Gardener by Des Kennedy

I thought that after diving into You Grow Girl that I might be done with the gardening books for now, until the snow has melted. I know myself better than this, but I had hopes. Instead, while browsing at my local library, I happened across another collection of gardening essays by one of my very favourite garden writers, Des Kennedy. His collection An Ecology of Enchantment was one of my favourite reads of last year, and The Passionate Gardener is the latest collection. It appears that he's got a memoir coming out this month, titled The Way of a Gardener, which I will certainly have to get my soil-chapped mitts on.

If you are a gardener, even just growing a potted plant or two, you really need to read Des Kennedy's gardening books. To be honest, I much preferred An Ecology of Enchantment -- I thought it was a more graceful book, in a lot of ways, and it had a very pleasing arc in the form of a monthly chronology. There was wider variety in the pieces, too. The Passionate Gardner is still a lot of fun to read, inspiring and entertaining. But there doesn't seem to be the same driving force, and some of the essays start to feel a bit samey. The hyperbole gets to be a little excessive as opposed to just straight humourous by the end of the book, although this might not be as much of a problem if you are smarter about reading this book than I was. I was enjoying myself so much, and needing to feel like spring was a possibility so much, that I have read this book in two days. Which might have been just a little too much at once.

But that's a very minor complaint. Very minor. I have thoroughly enjoyed my romp through Kennedy's garden and brain. It's funny, it's occasionally rather raunchy (there's a chapter that's a torrid love story about gardening based entirely on plant names, and it's steamier than one might think) and it's informative. It's also largely beautifully written: in the introduction, Kennedy talks about how "gardening burst into our lives like a howling southeaster." There are wonderfully quotable bits throughout the entire book. And it's all pretty much dead on. His observations resonate perfectly. He might be a little over-the-top, but I recognize where he's coming from exactly. This is about garden clubs, but it could just as easily be about naturalist clubs (I suspect there's significant membership overlap) or several other types of meetings I've been to:

(from the essay "Garden Clubbing")

Invariably, the introducer begins by describing the guest speaker as someone who "needs no introduction." One might thereby conclude that the introductory remarks will be brief, but it is soon revealed that the lack of a need for introduction will in no way hamper the introducer from launching into a peroration of unimaginable length and complexity during the course of which the guest speaker's accomplishments, both real and imaginary, are paraded for the admiration of all.

And when I say inspiring, I mean that it's nice to know that I'm not alone:

(from the essay "The Ten Commandments")

Perhaps the most problematic of all is the fifth commandment: "Thou shalt not kill." You know as well as I do that if gardeners ever took this commandment to heart, plant sales would plummet, the garden supply business would grind to a halt, and nurseries would declare bankruptcy as often as airlines. Fortunately, no such crisis is imminent, because if there's one thing gardeners are good at, it's the sustained and systematic killing of plants.

And, just because I enjoyed it, from my favourite essay in the collection, "Darwin Was No Gardener":

The early years were not easy. The little tree was disinclined to grow, and what marginal growth it did attempt was invariably in a contrary direction. We came to recognize that it was afflicted with a fear of heights, a considerable disadvantage in a tree.

This collection is recommended. I enjoyed this one enough that I've finally gone ahead and ordered my own copy of An Ecology of Enchantment so that I can re-read it as I wait for the crocuses to get their act together and burn through the snow. The essays range from travel reports, to musings on the gardener's various neuroses and quirks, to loving descriptions of plants. Lots of fun for gardeners and armchair gardeners and anyone who might want a little insight into this strange passion from which we gardeners suffer.

You Grow Girl by Gayla Trail

My reading plan for the week (Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi) got hijacked by sunshine. By which I mean, there is sunshine out there and when I walk outside it smells like spring. This means that it is time for me to break out the gardening books, because I can't actually get into the garden yet, probably for another four to six weeks.

Waiting for Gayla Trail's hugely popular (at our library) Grow Great Grub, I have instead picked up her earlier book, named after her blog, You Grow Girl. It's like gardening's answer to the young-hip-knitter books like Chicks with Sticks and Stitch 'N Bitch. It's a very basic guide to gardening, which I need more of like I need a hole in the head, but this one had a few perceived advantages over others.

First, Trail's Canadian. She lives in Toronto, not too far from me. I prefer to read advice from gardeners who have had to put up with crappy, too-hot-or-too-cool unpredictable summers and long, snowy winters. However, I've noticed that despite the fact that Trail gardens basically a stone's-throw (well, if I was Superman) away from my backyard, there is next to no Canadian-specific advice. It's very general leaning towards Americanized, even mentioning things like "state borders" instead of "provincial borders" and it has an inset telling me how to get my soil tested, if I'm American -- but no Canadian info on that. This is particularly galling as I had mentioned to a patron at the library that she was Canadian, and the patron was excited to read something specifically Canadian. Ah well. She does have an entire section on making it through the winter, so that helps. Particularly at this time of year.

The other perceived advantage was Trail's somewhat laissez-faire attitude, and on this she has delivered. I do not mean lazy (this is the sort of gardener I am), I mean try-it-and-see. With a helpful dash of let-it-go-don't-worry-about-it. See, though I am a lazy gardener, I am also an anxious gardener. Or I was, when I started. I am much less now, because let me tell you, being lazy and yet anxious is an exhausting combination. It helps to have books that essentially remind me that plants want to grow, much like The Potted Plant (reviewed lo these many years ago). Sometimes bad gardening books can be like bad parenting books: they make you feel like an idiot if you aren't doing things The Right Way. Trail's writing, however, is neither patronizing nor admonishing, and that's a great thing in a beginner book.

In this book, too, I have also discovered several nifty little ideas that get the creative gardening juices flowing. There are a few little recipes, sewing patterns (I'm going to try to make my own reusable tea bags now, when I get around to it) and other crafty ideas and plans, all very straightforward. The illustrations are cute and hip. Despite not focusing so much on Canada, Trail does provide some reassurances for container gardeners, including those who grow plants on fire escapes and tiny balconies. She's got some great ideas for people who are gardening in very small spaces. I don't have to put up with this anymore, but I still appreciate it.

Finally: if you're a young, hip, male gardener, there is no reason to not use this book, despite its title and despite the introductory paragraphs which do target young women. Generally, after that, Trail doesn't bother with making any distinctions; she just basically mentions the continuing trend of women of my generation in our particular culture picking up things for pleasure that our grandmothers had to do. I'm always sensitive to anything excluding one gender or the other, and this book certainly starts off with the impression of doing so. Part of me wishes she hadn't bothered with that and just kept it to the rest of the completely gender-neutral book, but I guess in the field of beginner gardening books one has to find a way to distinguish oneself.

Overall, Trail's gardening tips are simple to follow (largely) and organic; and her writing style is very accessible, enthusiastic without being terrifying or overwhelming. It is written as a book for raw gardening beginners and as such it delivers admirably. Someone like myself, who considers herself an expert armchair gardener but a bumbling beginner outdoors, can also pick up a few things, but there's not a lot here that will be brand new.

A Blessing of Toads by Sharon Lovejoy

I've been wanting to read and review this book since Nan posted about it months ago. I won it in her generous giveaway but it seemed to arrive at a particularly low point in my non-fic reading abilities, and I didn't want to ruin the book by reading it in the wrong mood.

I'm so glad I waited. This is a lovely book, and while it was a good book to read all at once, I think it would also be a good candidate for picking up and reading a little bit at a time. A Blessing of Toads is a collection of Sharon Lovejoy's articles from Country Living Gardener magazine, little bite-sized pieces (none longer than five pages) all smushed together into one book. To be honest, I've never read Country Living Gardener and I've never read anything by Lovejoy, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Whatever my expectations were, they were surpassed.

I learned a lot. I've been in outdoor education for the past eight years, and I grew up in a very nature-conscious family. I've been surrounded by naturalists my entire life, and so Lovejoy didn't have to convince me of the wonders of having nature in the garden -- to me, that's the point. But I learned a lot from her about nature, and also about things I could be doing to attract further critters to the backyard. Even more, she reminded me (I knew, but sometimes it's hard to remember) to just take the time to watch. I know there are amazing things happening in my garden every day, I just need to look for them. So I was envious of her stories -- of her family of crows, of her garter snake, of her phoebe nest -- but I realize I am just starting. I've got a long way to go, and I've also got some time to catch up.

Lovejoy also has the perfect gardening philosophy for me:

I like this laissez-faire gardening attitude. Newman's words of wisdom coupled with Julian Donahue's comment, "A lazy gardener is one of the best friends of wildlife," leads me to believe that I may have found my gardening niche.

She calls hornworms unicornworms. I'm going to start using this, and maybe I won't be so squicked out by them (because I can handle almost anything, but a hornworm is a big, twitchy, squishy thing with a horn, people -- a unicornworm is the trusty steed of the tomato flower sprite, and noble, not terrifying). She also coins the title term, "a blessing of toads" to replace the term "a knot of toads" for a group of the trusty little amphibians. I like the way she thinks.

A few of the other things I learned:

• syrphid flies (flowerflies) have voraceous larvae called "aphid tigers" that will eat a plant clean of aphids and other garden pests
• Nashville warblers can eat three tent caterpillars a minute -- now, not saying they do that every minute of every day, but that warbler is really moving

I also liked:

"Crepuscular" is a great word that rolls around in my mouth like a handful of jawbreakers.

She's humble, enthusiastic, and energetic -- her personality bubbles through the pages, sometimes factual, sometimes whimsical, always informative. I am giving this book to my co-worker Joanne to read, because I know she'll love it.

Thanks again, Nan. We have some of Lovejoy's other work at the library and I'll be checking it out. I love finding a new garden writer who both inspires and relaxes me.

An Ecology of Enchantment by Des Kennedy

I am afraid that I might go on at length about this book. I suspect it is best enjoyed by people who have gardens of their own, or wish they did, or have had in the past. But I hesitate to say that no one else would enjoy it -- it might be just the book to convince you that you should grow a thing or two after all. I'm already convinced that I should probably try to grow kale, which was not the case before I read this book, for example. It's hard to say no in the face of such enthusiastic praise for a lowly brassica.

Des Kennedy is another one of those famous Canadian gardeners. He and his wife Sandy garden out on the West Coast, which is probably the best place to garden in Canada -- they have longer summers and warmer winters than the rest of us, meaning they can grow a huge variety of plants, and leave their root vegetables in the ground over winter. That said, it's not without its challenges, which Kennedy describes alongside the joys.

The book is structured, as its subtitle advertises, as a year in the life of Kennedy's garden. He has written an essay per week for an entire year, about 10 years ago and published them as a record -- sometimes practical, sometimes advertising favourite plants (as with the kale), sometimes musing on the spiritual aspects of gardening and gardeners. 52 short essays and almost all of them entirely quotable. I'll get to that in a minute.

There are a couple of overall things that I enjoyed about this book, which may or may not conflict with people's reading tastes. I really don't think this book is for everyone despite how much I loved it. For one thing, Kennedy likes words. He likes big or obscure words and he's not afraid to use them. For instance, does anyone know what "inveigle" means? Now I do. It's synonymous with entice; also to gain something by flattery. What I really appreciate here is that I don't often run into words I've not met before. At least not when reading something written in modern English in the past 10 years. But I've always loved that feeling of running across words I don't recognize and having to puzzle it out based on context or etymology. I used to do that all the time as a kid.

Another thing I enjoyed but might not be to everyone's taste is the hyperbole and prose that occasionally veers past purple into indigo. What makes this enjoyable, as opposed to unbearable, is that Kennedy is a very self-aware writer, so you never get the impression that he's doing this innocently. He knows exactly what's going on, and even devotes one chapter to pointing out how flamboyant garden writing often is, at least on the subject of poppies. He just clearly enjoys playing with language as much as he enjoys gardening.

But the best thing about this book, by far, is how humane it is. I am just starting my gardening career, really, and it's mostly trial and error. More error than anything else. An Ecology of Enchantment follows the ups and downs, both the joys and the frustration of a mature garden. These experiences parallel my own limited gardening experience, and rather than being disheartening, it's nice to know that despite heartbreak and discouragement the garden largely keeps on growing. More than any other gardening book I've read, this one seems to invoke a sense of both ongoing, steady continuity and ongoing, sometimes unplanned change. Kennedy's writing is humble, self-deprecating, hilarious, and always optimistic.

As I said before, there are a large number of quotable bits, so I'm only going to give you a smattering.

On the feverishly garden-deprived gardener in winter:

Thus the bleak days of winter can be whiled away in trenchant analysis and stirring plans for action, the bulk of which can be abandoned with the onset of spring before any permanent damage is done.

On daffodils:

I think the most frequently seen big yellow trumpet types work best at a distance where they're free to excite the romantic poet's imagination from half a mile away without yellowing us to death.

On the bewildering, daunting world of roses and their never-ending hybrids:

Anarchy seems the order of the day, with wild-eyed hybridizers running riot in the streets while tactical squads of classifiers bang their shields to try to maintain some semblance of order.

He also has a habit of dropping a description here and there that seems somehow perfect. From the rose chapter:

Rambling Albertine and long-limbed New Dawn reclining against the old woodshed like two beautiful sisters, arms outstretched to touch one another's fingers.

and the introduction:

a hummingbird appears in an irridescent commotion

The book I have was borrowed from my mother, who was borrowing it from my grandmother, who received it from me for Christmas (on the off chance that she would probably like it, since I get my gardening genes from her). I'm going to have to get myself my own copy. This one is a keeper.

My Natural History by Liz Primeau

My notes about this book are all over the place, I think because I took them as I was reading. I didn't want to forget anything. I've started doing that with many books I read -- something will occur to me that I want to write about on the blog here, and so I'll write it down. It's good I do, too, because I do forget.

This is a memoir, the life story of a gardener. Liz Primeau is something of a "name" in Canadian gardening, not least as the founding editor of Canadian Gardening magazine, not to mention hosting a tv show and writing several gardening books (today I ordered her Front Yard Gardens: Growing More than Grass from the library.) What I had somehow missed is that she grew up first in Winnipeg, and then in Paisley, Ontario, not far from my summer stomping grounds at Grandma and Grandpa's farm. This added a special dimension for me, because I know the area, and I first fell in love with gardening thanks to Grandma's wonderful perennials and vegetables.

The book is a collection of thoughts on gardening, many intensely personal, and an examination of the role gardening and her own gardens have played in her life, from her father's vegetable garden in Winnipeg to her own mature garden in Mississauga. She also explores garden lore and is particularly interested in garden history, although to be honest I don't think she's at her strongest when discussing these. She's at her best when discussing her own gardens, her gardening philosophy, the people around her, and her gardening influences.

One of my favourite parts in the book was when she was discussing her early disdain for old standards, like spirea and bleeding heart, before she wised up and realized that they're old standards for a reason -- they're relatively easy to care for, don't suffer from many of the problems of new varieties or exotics, and so forth. I thought, at one point, "Oh yes! Me too! But I'm also beyond that," thinking of my peonies and petunias last year. And then I realized that I'm planning to rid the front garden of the spirea and have no fondness for bleeding heart whatsoever (they're both boring!) Hmm.

I fully respect her and and her experience, and agree with her statement that gardening is a therapeutic endeavour. I can see myself in her experience quite often. I agree with her assessment that gardening "trends" are ridiculous, given that it takes at least a couple of years for any garden to start coming into its own. I love her discussions on biodiversity and the efforts she has made to make sure her garden is a healthy ecosystem. I am completely with her on the front yard garden lines: they're a great idea, much better than expanses of monoculture grass.

There are some things that I completely disagree with her about, too. In particular, I adore cats but they have no place outdoors, in my backyard, or in anyone else's back yard. Outdoor cats are viciously destructive to the native fauna (birds, mice, small rodents, insects, whatever) even if you think they're not, even if you think you're watching them closely. Besides, it's not a good environment for the cat either -- there are cars, raccoons, dogs, skunks, nasty humans. I could go on at length about it but that's not really the point of this blog.

But I can respect her opinions even if I disagree. The fact that I didn't throw down the book in disgust during her rhapsody to the neighbourhood cats, and even found it amusing at points, speaks to the fact that overall I really enjoyed the book. I don't think the prose is spectacular; it's very chatty, but that makes it very engaging. It's a pleasant read and a balm for someone like me, stuck in the early March sunshine and desperate to get out the trowel and the seeds.

The Organic Home Garden by Patrick Lima

I wanted to write about this book because, in my humble opinion, it is an outstanding gardening book. It remains the guide I go to year after year. It is the one book that I live in fear of my local library weeding from their collection without my knowledge, thus denying me access to it. It's published by Key Porter, and it is "out of stock indefinitely" according to their website. I have a local bookseller who may have ideas, and I need to talk to them before I panic.

For a reference book it's completely readable, and it's a pleasant read to boot. Lima never attempts to suggest that what works for him will work for anyone else. That said, it quickly becomes clear that he absolutely knows what he is talking about, and that following his suggestions is probably a very good idea.

To know why I love this book so much, it maybe makes sense for me to finally come to terms with something: my first, and greatest, gardening love is the vegetable garden. I like perennials, I'm growing appreciative of annuals, I'm always happy to see the bulbs that manage to escape the squirrels. But it is the vegetable garden that I love. It has something to do with the treasure hunt for peas and beans, digging up new potatoes, discovering the squash hidden under the great squash leaves, watching an eggplant go from a beautiful purple flower to a stunning purple fruit. There's something about knowing that I can grow brussels sprouts in my own garden that makes me want to learn to like them.

One of the things I love about Lima's writing, no matter what he's writing about, is that I believe his first gardening love is the vegetable garden, too.

Throughout the book's helpful tips and tricks and guidelines for growing organically and growing well, are stories about past gardens. We hear the story of how Lima and his partner John Scanlon ended up at Larkwhistle, and I am amazed at how brave they were, and how they managed to make it work. We get little tidbits of information on how various vegetables were used and viewed in the past. We hear about their very first garden, on a little rented lot in Toronto. I love especially this bit:

But optimistically we dug and planted. Results were mixed. Tomatoes spread into a wild tangle, half their fruit lost under leaves; zucchinis swelled overnight, apparently blown up by some unseen squash fairy. Marigolds bloomed among the vegetables and morning glories crawled over everything. Unwittingly we spread fungus on the Swiss chard by watering every evening. Not knowing better, we transplanted small pea vines from the shade to the sunnier front yard; the peas, not knowing that they "resent transplanting," attached themselves to strings and began to climb. Cucumbers soon joined them to veil the front porch in green vines hung with fruit.

Can't you picture it? What a fabulous garden that must have been, and how exciting. I like the part about the peas especially, because it reminds me that plants want to grow. They want to grow in spite of their hapless gardeners. I love a forgiving hobby.

This book is fantastic because the information is good, the writing is great, and the whole thing makes organic vegetable gardening seem quite accessible. Not always a walk in the park, but accessible. I also am drawn in by the sheer awe in which Lima clearly holds all living things. It's a "how to" of the best sort, with beautiful photographs, information about soils, troubleshooting, and various groups of vegetables that can be grown reliably in Canada. If you like gardening, or just the idea of gardening, try to get your hands on a copy of this book. And if you do, please tell me where you got it because I want one too.