The American Gardener - William Cobbett

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 .