Coping With Woodchucks : SECOND NATURE: A Gardener’s Education, <i> By Michael Pollan (Atlantic Monthly Press: $19.95; 258 pp.)</i>

Starting out as a certified Manhattan slob (ask any woodchuck), Michael Pollan worked his way up to the happy estate of civilized gardener in only a few years.

He is now, one might say, one of nature’s noblemen, but when he began his garden in the middle of nowhere in the hard climate of far Connecticut he flew into an unworthy rage the first time a woodchuck, dear little fellow, ate a few of his lettuces. He blocked the tunnel with rocks, poured in molasses, stuffed in a dead mouse and a dead woodchuck and at last tried creosote and gasoline, which he lit. Burned him, heh-heh.

At this time he was an editor (he is executive editor of Harper’s) and such behavior is perhaps not unparalleled by others of his trade, but he had vestigial sanity and, at bottom, a good heart. He built a fence and learned thereby the first great lesson of gardening, which is humility, or at least the absence of insolent hubris.

His book resonates with all the overtones of experience. He has agreeably harsh things to say about absolutists who believe the only choice for nature lovers is between full and untouched wilderness or, on the other hand, high-technology agribusiness and its home-garden equivalent full of power tools and clouds of unholy vapor for the bugs.

He is already into ladybugs, and well on the way to noticing that the trouble with many garden chemicals is that they do not do the job nearly as well as if the gardener did nothing at all. The usual cause of failures in any garden, after all, is, first, the wrongheaded notions of the gardener (as in attempting lawns in much of California) but followed quickly by weather, which frequently defeats reasonable and expert plantings even in the greatest gardens of England. Waves of poison might solve the stupidity problem but not the weather.

The author tries things that don’t work. So do all gardeners. Poor Thomas Jefferson had a passion for chinaberry trees but never could keep them long on his mountaintop. Pollan also discovered that nature, while red of tooth, etc., yet showers on the gardener such successes that she can only be likened to that Venus on her seashell with roses dropping all about her. Gardeners are possibly the only ones who gaze first at the roses (they are varieties of Rosa Alba that Pollan grows).

He speaks feelingly and amusingly about the current rage for “old roses” and goes out on various limbs of sociology to explain it. Nonsense, of course, but all the better for that. The surviving old roses owe their existence not to elegant snobs but to boondock gardeners too poor or too far out of fashion to acquire the “improved” roses that have superseded them.

He seems at times too concerned both with Anglophiles, whom he generally equates with a small and uppity minority (the result of living in New York, very likely), and, at the other end, the low taste of those who have no interest in the matter. As if one were to criticize the blind for not distinguishing nicely among tones of green. As he grows old in his garden, which God willing, he will care less what other gardeners do and don’t do, and will follow Voltaire in raising his own glorious cabbages.

Already he has found the natural world enough, as a poet put it, and that is one giant step for any man.

The author writes with humor, acerbity, magnanimity (sometimes) and all those good qualities that lead to charm and--one almost dares say it--wisdom. He comprehends that the highest amusement and most satisfactory compromise with the sorrows, commonly overstated, of the human condition is to grunt and sweat and fardels bear in a garden. Up to a point.

He mulls and chews over and reflects--the best trait of good editors, of course--and discovers profound things. His book is a joy to read, heightened by such small perversities as supposing that an appreciation of color, form, texture and fragrance in flowers is a new thing in America. That is the same as assuming prehistoric humans had no brains and just waddled about saying “Duh.”

In fact, American gardeners of the 17th and 18th centuries were keenly pleased by fragrant plants. In the 18th Century, Jefferson exported heliotrope to America while in France, writing that the scent made all the bother worthwhile, and a list of plants commonly grown shows many, maybe most, valued only for their smell. The nose did not arrive in America in 1960.

Pollan’s aim, however, is not to become a new authority on garden facts but to chronicle--that is not too grand a word--his progress from darkness into light. He once slaughtered, or at least tortured, woodchucks. Now he is a civilized man. And rather a hell of a nice writer.

Do not, by the way, miss his father, who disliked wearing pants, and his grandfather, who kept trying to make the family fly right.