quote · Legacy record
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.
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.
Approximate author period: c. 1955 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Michael Pollan
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- Approximate author period: c. 1955 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1955; activity date not established; Wikidata Q1138996, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1138996 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 108028; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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