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rainbowgardener
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Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
Location: TN/GA 7b

A couple good books on topics of interest

Here's some of what I've been reading lately:

Michael Pollan , Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. Michael Pollan (A Botany of Desire, Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, etc.) is one of my favorite authors. His writing is excellent, thoughtful, vivid, descriptive, concise, interesting and sometimes entertaining/ humorous. In this book he uses his own experiences, starting out as a relative beginning gardener, buying an old neglected farm, as a framework for his thesis about the need for a sensibility about nature that is about stewardship and responsibility. He is basically saying that we are past where we can just leave places alone (whether that be our own backyards, which will immediately revert to weeds and raccoons or places like Yellowstone and Yosemite). We need a sense of nature which includes us and our own actions, not to feel that we are intruders, but to be part of nature, but try to be a protective rather than destructive part of it.

Along the way he throws in explorations of lawns and their history, history of roses, what is a weed really, garden design, composting, etc, all illustrated with his personal experiences as well as a lot of knowledge.

The other book I read recently is Rowan Jacobsen, Fruitless Fall: The collapse of the honeybee and the coming agricultural crisis. It is a detailed exploration of the lives of honeybees (lots of interesting facts about what goes on in hives) and what is happening to them, non-polemic, with lots of evidence. His conclusion is that the collapse of honeybees is not due to any one thing (neo-nicotinoid pesticides or anything else), but the whole way that honeybees are raised and treated and our whole agricultural system. He makes parallels between the way honeybees are commercially raised and all the rest of commercial agriculture. I think it is a very important book and one that has interesting conclusions for those of us who just do backyard gardening and maybe would like a beehive or two.

Enjoy! And please let me know if you do read or have read (English is so funny, phonetically that is do reed or have red !) either of these books.



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