In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.
About This Quote
About Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan was a contemporary American author and journalist. Michael Kevin Pollan is an American journalist who is a professor and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Nature — Appreciation for the natural world and our place within it