The American Gardener

William Cobbett, born in Surrey in 1762, was the most prolific muck-raking journalist of his age and the publisher of The Political Register, the main newspaper of the working class in early-nineteenth-century England. He died in 1835.Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire (available from Random House Trade Paperbacks) and Second Nature, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.