Janna’s Reviews > Second Nature: A Gardener's Education > Status Update

“All or nothing,” says the wilderness ethic, and in fact we’ve ended up with a landscape in America that conforms to that injunction remarkably well. Thanks to exactly this kind of either/or thinking, Americans have done an admirable job of drawing lines around certain sacred areas [of wilderness] and a terrible job of managing the rest of our land.

Using instruments of gas analysis… mankind has now actually observed the breathing of the earth, which follows an annual rhythm: every summer, the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere falls as the forests inhale; every winter, after photosynthesis subsides and civilization steps up its combustion of fossil fuel, the carbon dioxide levels rise again, a little higher each year.

“To plant trees,” Russell Page wrote in his memoir, “is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.”

Lawns, I am convinced, are a symptom of, and a metaphor for, our skewed relationship to the land. They teach us that, with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stoke our hubris with regard to the land.

“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed… Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot…Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it”

Me trying to convince Brett to get rid of the lawn and plant more plants….