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

The author of this book sets out on a journey to uncover the essence of wilderness. Instead of travelling 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.

John Hanson Mitchell’s work is focused on a square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located about thirty-five miles north-west of Boston. Mitchell has used this anomalous landscape of rolling hills, farms, forests and encroaching suburbs to explore his continuing interest in natural and human history and the whole question of place in human cultures, both native and European. Best known of this series of books is the first, Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The latest book in the group is An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden. All of these books have been collected together in a series known as The Scratch Flat Chronicles.