The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness

A journey to uncover the essence of wilderness, by one of this country's most original nature writers. In five previous books, John Hanson Mitchell has explored small local landscapes to ask the larger question of what it means to be living on earth in our time. In his newest exploration he sets out from the convoluted paths of a traditional hedge maze in his own garden to find, in the civilized and ordered gardens of Italy, the inspiration for the painters and conservationists who shaped an American concept of wilderness. While searching for wildness in today's crowded, smog-filled wilderness parks, however, he is pulled inward and toward home, back to what Thoreau called contact: an abiding, enduring, and daily connection with the world of nature. Throughout this quest are the observations, the wit and the aura of magic that have endeared knowing readers to the work of this natural historian.