Product Description

A captivating journey to uncover the essence of wilderness, by one of this country's most original nature writers. In The Wildest Place on Earth Mitchell sets out on a journey to uncover the essence of wilderness. Instead of traveling to remote, untamed parts of the world, Mitchell ends up exploring the green realms of his childhood and the gardens of Italy. He is pulled inward and toward home, back to what Thoreau called "contact"--an abiding, enduring, and daily connection with the world. He comes to realize that the wildest place may be right in his own backyard.A Merloyd Lawrence Book

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1665368 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Amazon.com
In the hearts of the elaborate Renaissance gardens of Italy, writes essayist John Hanson Mitchell, lie small patches of untended ground, overgrown with moss and tangled undergrowth, called boscos. These wild patches are there to remind us of the untamed country that lies far outside the city walls, the abode of wild animals, where wilderness experiences are to be had for the adventurous traveler. A veteran of many such experiences, Mitchell counsels that wilderness does not teach us much about how to live in and with nature; such lessons lie closer to home, for, he writes, wildness "lurks in the wilder corners of suburbia, or even in cities, and exists as potential even in some of the most barren, devastated environments."

In The Wildest Place on Earth, Mitchell travels to Mediterranean gardens, writing of their meaning and history. Heeding his own counsel, he also sticks close to his own home, restoring a hardscrabble New England farm called Scratch Flat, building mazes and trellises, and exploring the lessons that making a garden offer a student of the natural world. Though his efforts at environmental philosophizing tend to be underdone, his dedication to gardening is evident, and his account of that hard but rewarding work may inspire like-minded readers to take up their trowels. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Mitchell (Ceremonial Time) opens this lush, labyrinthine book with his long-ago encounter, in the American desert, with "a wildman," "who claimed you could live forever in the wilderness with two or three milk goats and a working knowledge of edible plants." The younger Mitchell embraced this philosophy, but, ultimately, it was in "the most thoroughly transformed landscape of all, the hedged terraces, all‚es, pathways, pools, fountains, and hidden rooms of what was left of the old Renaissance gardens of Italy" that he "rediscovered that old sense of goatly wildness." From the great mazes of ancient Egypt to the 12th-century hedge maze where Henry II's wife murdered his mistress, to the construction of his own backyard maze and tea house, Mitchell explores the wilderness of the human imagination and "the undiscovered country of the nearby." Three of what Thoreau would have called "clews" to Mitchell's project keep cropping up: first, Thoreau's idea of "Contact," or oneness with nature; second, the contrast between conceptions of true wilderness "as a separate place" with "a certain aura of power or ability to bestow information or insight" and the construction of the garden; and finally, the beloved demigod Pan, who physically embodies both the untamed forests and deserts (his goat half) and sculpted gardens (his human half). Part travelogue, part garden history in the tradition of Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens, this poetic little book traces the transportation of humankind to the wilderness and the transformation of the wild into rich human habitat.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In a vibrant blend of personal anecdote and fresh historical interpretations, nature writer Mitchell offers stimulating observations about unexpected connections between garden design and wilderness preservation. After realizing that a vacation-style "wilderness experience" didn't satisfy his need for a "life in nature," Mitchell turned to gardening. He soon developed a fascination with hedge mazes and labyrinths, ancient emblems of humanity's connection to the earth, and the Italian Renaissance garden, a "model of divine order." Gratified to discover that he was following in the footsteps of the nineteenth-century American visionaries Emerson and Muir, Mitchell discerned that their appreciation for the gardens of Italy, supremely gracious manifestations of civilization, contributed mightily to their perception of the spirituality of nature and their pivotal roles in establishing a tradition of American wilderness protection. As for Mitchell, he revels in the fact that wildness, the "life-sustaining current," flows just as gloriously on home ground as in a remote forest or desert and has come to prefer the quiet of a garden to the clamor of car- and tourist-filled national parks. Donna Seaman
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