a good book
6 Sep
Taking my sweet time reading Michael Pollan’s gardening book, “Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education.” So lovely and poetic. Especially this paragraph, in the chapter about summer:
The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe. Success in the garden is the moment in time, that week in June when the perennials unanimously bloom and the border jells, or those clarion days in September when the reds riot in the tomato patch – just before the black frost hits. … For the garden is never done – the weeds you pull today will return tomorrow, a new generation of aphids will step forward to avenge the ones you’ve slain, and everything you plant – everything – sooner or later will die.
And then there’s this one, a few paragraphs later:
There is a mood that sometimes overtakes you in the garden, a form of consciousness, even, that feels like nothing so much as a waking dream. I imagine most gardeners have known it at one time or another. Maybe it is a late afternoon in July and you have been busy in the garden at a variety of small tasks – snipping the spent blooms off day lilies, pulling weeds, pinching suckers from the tomatoes just setting fruit, cutting back a leggy nepeta to promote a second bloom. You are working intently, and though sweat may be beading your brow, the work feels as effortless as puttering. … As your hands work the world retreats.
Quite gorgeous, ain’t it?
