A Conversation with Michael Pollan

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A Conversation with Michael Pollan

By Therese Ciesinski



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In The Garden

Pollan's small garden packs a lot of growing and living into a relatively small area. It's dominated by three large raised cedar beds filled with vegetables and herbs, which grow more than enough for Pollan, his wife, Judith Belzer, and son, Isaac. Taking up most of the remaining space is a huge fire pit, where the family often cooks. The August day is cool and overcast, but dry-typical Bay Area weather. We sit outdoors on a patio made of basalt that forms a black grid against the pale gravel paths.

His book The Botany of Desire has just been made into a PBS documentary, and we talk about how gardening requires us to have a plan, an agenda, but that sometimes what we grow has one, too. Certain plants succeed in getting humans to help them evolve and establish in places they couldn't get to without us, and they do it by appealing to human desires.

"The botany of desire is very much about getting in the gardener's head. I think gardeners instinctively understand this idea that they're manipulated by their plants-that it is a two-way street; you can't call all the shots. You have to let go."

Pollan discovered he was holding on too tightly when, as a novice gardener, he was driven to firestorm the burrow of a woodchuck that was raiding his vegetables, almost immolating his garden in the process. He realized that Americans have a split personality when it comes to the natural world: We simultaneously worship it and try to control it. But nature always has the last word. "I'm interested in the tension between the practical and the theoretical, and the garden's the place where we work it out. We read books to learn how to garden; then the reality turns out to be very complicated. It doesn't come out the way it's supposed to in the book, and there are always surprises." There sure are.

The photographer asks for an "action shot," and Pollan obligingly begins pruning an overgrown zucchini. There's a snip, then a "darn it." He's clipped too much and now holds a contorted bouquet of vines, leaves, flowers, and baby zucchini. So much for control. Sometimes we're our own woodchucks.

Want More?
Find the full article "A Conversation with Michael Pollen" in the November-January 2010 issue of Organic Gardening Magazine.

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