The drunks at Penn Station may not have approved of the book I’m reading right now, but I’m really enjoying it. I’ve liked the other two books by Michael Pollan that I’ve read (The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire), but I was a little skeptical about this earlier book on gardening. Not least of all because, despite the seemingly endless number of photographs I take of plants and vegetables, I don’t have much of a green thumb. But I needn’t have worried. Pollan is as engaging here as in his other work, where he’s essentially asking us to do one simple thing: to think about nature and our relationship to it, whether it be the food we consume or our neighborhood lawns:
Of course the democratic front yard has its darker, more coercive side, as my family learned in Farmingdale. In commending the “plain style” of an unembellished lawn for American front yards, the midcentury designer/reformers were, like Puritan ministers, laying down rigid conventions governing our relationship to the land, our observance of which would henceforth be taken as an index to our character. And just as the Puritans would not tolerate any individual who sought to establish his or her own back-channel relationship with the divinity, the members of the suburban utopia do not tolerate the homeowner who establishes a relationship with the lawn that is not mediated by the group’s conventions. The parallel is not as farfetched as it might sound, when you recall that nature in America has often been regarded as divine. Think of nature as Spirit, the collective suburban lawn as the Church, and lawn mowing as a kind of sacrament. You begin to see why ornamental gardening would take so long to catch on in America, and why my father might seem an antinomian in the eyes of his neighbors. Like Hester Prynne, he claimed not to need their consecration for his actions; think of his initials [which he once mowed] in the front lawn as a kind of Emerald Letter.
Perhaps because it is this common land, rather than race or tribe, that makes us all Americans, we have developed a deep-seated distrust of individualistic approaches to the landscape. This land is too important to our identity as Americans to simply allow everybody to have their own way. After having decided that the land should serve as a vehicle of consensus, rather than as an arena for self-expression, the American lawn–collective, nationalized, ritualized, and plain–presented the ideal solution. The lawn has come to express our attitudes toward the land as eloquently as Le Notre’s confident geometries expressed the humanism of Renaissance France, or Capability Brown’s picturesque parks expressed the stirrings of romanticism in England.
