Michael Pollan is writing for an American audience, but this book is, for quite different reasons, fascinating and thought-provoking to a British reader. In Britain, as in most of Europe, there is not a square inch of ground which hasn't been used, managed and often cultivated by man for thousands of years. From the Neolithic hut circles high in the Dartmoor heather to the Saxon coppice-stools still flourishing in the depths of the wood, even the wildest bits of Britain are in a sense, garden; it's something we take for granted. When the first settlers arrived, the (man-made) open glades and groves of New England were regarded as a kind of Eden, an untouched Arcadia, and the Native Americans as archetypes of the Noble Savage. That attitude soon changed, and the rest is history. Only in the mid-nineteenth century, when the European had almost succeeded in obliterating everything natural within US boundaries, did a movement start to preserve, and idolise, what remained of the "Wilderness". Out of this reaction grew an attitude to nature which is curiously schizophrenic. Michael Pollan explores this strange relationship and, through his meditations, the European understands a lot about the culture of the United States.
To an American, the area round his or her house, no matter its size, is a "yard". Gardening is "yard work" - a strange masculine blend of tightly controlling nature while paying lip service to revering it. He explains the history and psychology of the American passion for vast areas of mown grass, stretching without boundaries along the fronts of miles of suburban properties, and explores the social pressure not to deviate from the "American way" in your yard. He reveals to us the extraordinary suspicion of most Americans of the "garden" in the traditional British sense; the unease with any form of cultivation which isn't rigidly aimed at producing neat vegetables or regimented floral displays. He explains how Americans who want a garden of the European type still tend to employ English garden designers, no home-grown equivalent being available. All this is remarkable to a European reader and one turns the pages in astonishment.
Michael Pollan's book is part gardening autobiography, part sociology, part philosophy. It is rich with interesting stuff, and one doesn't need to be a gardener to get a great deal from it. His style is light and his arguments easy to follow; his project, though polemical, never heavy-handed. My four stars are down to the fact that, as an English reader, much of this is rather redundant; there are long passages which come into the category of "preaching to the converted". If I were an American reader I think it would get the fifth star without any doubt.
