The Idea of a Garden

The garden of man, is mans attempt to continue, cultivate, and preserve certain natural fancies. A garden has always been considered a very natural endeavor of man, at least more so than most other interests. However, upon reading Pollan's essay "The Idea of a Garden", we see that perhaps we have a distorted and subjective perspective on what a garden should be, if it should be at all. White says of her garden, "I like to think its like walking past a woodland garden, the hot breeze pushing the striped lilies this way and that" (179). Here she is talking about how the garden is something preserves the idea of another place, or more, it represents that other place and time in itself. Here the garden is described as a place to preserve something that no longer is, for fear of losing what that was forever. Pollan describes it as "pitting the interests of man against nature", in a much more extreme, but still similar sense (597). In Pollans essay, he is describing this battle of interests over a plot of forest that some wish to preserve for future generations to enjoy its beauty, against those who would leave it to its natural course. In this way we see that gardens are not so much their own stemming or representation of nature, but more what nature was, or what man would like to take from it.