Cultivating an Appreciation for the Oneness of Existence

Delight, we usually think, is spontaneous. Cultivating implies planning and effort. Put them together and you have the contradiction that lies at the heart of Diana Ackerman’s book-length essay: one familiar to gardeners, who work on the border between wildness and civilization, who revel in nature even as they stake, prune, poison and regulate it.

Ackerman (most notably the author of “A Natural History of the Senses”) is a poet and naturalist who lives in the college town of Ithaca, N.Y., with English-born novelist Paul West. West’s role in her garden, she says, is to be “statuary”: He sits in a patio chair, dreaming up new plots, while she works on a backdrop of flower beds whose colors change with the seasons.

The climate of Ithaca is “robust,” Ackerman says: springs that hesitate, then hurry; hot, humid summers; autumns of blazing leaves and killing frosts; snowy winters.

In the year that this book describes--from one March to the next--the spectacle of births and deaths we can see in any garden is intensified by upstate New York’s violent swings in temperature.

In the tradition of American nature writers as various as Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard and John Muir, Ackerman is moved by this spectacle to meditate on wider issues: the connection between the life of her garden and human life.

Less political than Thoreau, less mystical than Dillard, Ackerman aims to reconcile us with our animal nature and remove our sense, prideful or guilty, of being separate from the rest of the natural world.

If we lose our arrogance, she believes, we might not be so willing to exterminate species wholesale and destroy the rain forests before we have even identified all their potentially valuable plants and animals. On a smaller scale, she prefers to pick Japanese beetles one by one from her 120 rosebushes and drown them in soapy water rather than spray her garden with pesticides.

Yet guilt--the feeling, expressed by Muir and others, that humans are interlopers, worse than nature--is also a mistake, Ackerman says. It is, ironically, part of nature itself.

“One feels that [nature] doesn’t include socks, cars or colleges. But that’s not true. Nature, by definition, includes all living things and all their dramas.... [It] embraces TV shows, mascara, and baseball games, just as it embraces talons and turf fights.... Nature isn’t an alien force, nor does it surround us. We are nature, and our cities and inventions, like termite mounds, are part of its complexity.”

Ackerman models the balance she wants us to achieve by the way her prose balances her two sides: the poet and the naturalist.

She paints striking word-pictures of blooms and hummingbirds, snowdrifts and clouds, and tosses off startling scientific facts: “Spring travels north at about 13 miles a day” or “homing pigeons have deposits of magnetite in their brains that respond to the Earth’s changing fields.” The pre-chewing of food by mother birds--and by human mothers thousands of years ago--for babies to digest is “the most likely origin of French kissing,” in which the touch of a tongue still evokes a sense of being loved and nourished.

Ackerman’s own model is Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), an English gardening authority who compensated for poor eyesight by developing “astonishing senses ... she could hear rustling in the grass and know whether it was a bird, lizard, mouse or snake. She could identify most birds by the sound of their flight. She could identify trees by the sound of the wind in their leaves, even as the seasons changed and the leaves dried or hardened.... She had a breathtaking gift for sensuality equaled only by Helen Keller’s.... But perhaps the greatest of her gifts”--and it was no less a gift for her having worked at it, says Ackerman, who clearly knows a little about this herself--”was her capacity for delight.”