The More I Learn, the Less I Know
Welcome to the Weekly Edition
It's the quiet week — the short break before the summer semester begins — and I've spent a good part of it doing one of my favorite things: thinking about books.
This issue is a little different. With classes on pause, there are no recaps this week. Instead, I'm starting something new: a place to share the things I find myself recommending again and again. We're beginning with books, and I'll warn you now — there are a lot of them.
If you're one of my students, scroll down before you do anything else. There's some important registration news for the summer, and a couple of classes that need you.
One scheduling note: there's no Monday Garden Hangout this week, and there won't be for a little while. We held a vote, and Sunday evenings won — so the next Garden Hangout is set for Sunday, June 28, from 7 to 8 pm. Assuming it isn't 105 degrees out. I'll confirm closer to the day.
Let's get into it.
For Students
It's break week, so I'll keep this short — but there's one thing I need to put in front of you before summer begins: please make sure you're registered.
A few of my classes are running low right now, and a couple need more students just to run. If you're planning to join me this summer, registering early genuinely helps — you, me, and the folks in the office trying to make the numbers work.
A few classes that need you
Palomares (PSC) — Tuesdays, 10:30 am. This one is back on the schedule. The catch: only two people are enrolled right now. That number will climb once I can hand out registration forms on the first day, but I need at least 20 students registered for the class to run at all. If you can make a Tuesday morning work, please sign up — and bring a friend if you've got one.
La Verne (LV) — Tuesdays, 1 pm. We're at 16, which should be fine, but we're a little lower than I'd like. If you're planning to come but know you'll miss the first week and haven't registered yet, send me a note so I can count you toward the total.
Wildlife Sanctuary (WLS) — Fridays, 10:15 am. I'll be teaching this one again for the short six-week summer, and we're sitting at nine students. If you've ever been curious about it, this is a low-commitment way to try it — just show up the first day. And if you can't make week one but plan to attend, let me know so I can give the office an honest estimate for week two.
Every other class is looking good.
Syllabi
I'm posting the summer syllabi as they're finalized. You can find them here:
https://www.growingwithprofessorbrown.com/classes
If the one you're after isn't up yet, give it a day — I'm uploading through the weekend.
A Few Good Things
As promised, here are a few book recommendations. I'm still building out the spot on the website where I'll gather these, so in the meantime I've started this little corner of the newsletter — a place to pass along the things I think are worth your while, from books to tools to whatever else seems helpful.
This week, it's books. A lot of books. These are the ones I come back to and recommend to my students over and over, grouped loosely so you can find your way in.
Start here — for everyone
These will shift how you see things, whether or not you ever pick up a trowel.
The One-Straw Revolution — Masanobu Fukuoka. The doorway into Japanese natural farming, which is woven right through regenerative gardening. Fukuoka was a rice farmer, but what stays with me is how he learned to see — stepping back, observing, and working with nature instead of trying to dominate it. Learn how he looked at his fields, and you'll start to look at your own garden differently.
Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the book reads like poetry. It isn't strictly about gardening, but it's about our relationship with the living world — and I'd argue that relationship is the whole point of being a gardener.
Anything by Wendell Berry. If you want something good to read and you just don't know where to start, pick up anything he wrote. You won't be disappointed.
Deepening the connection — worldview and place
Wildness: Relations of People and Place — edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer. A collection of essays on what it means to be wild and how we're tangled up with the rest of the living world. It includes Enrique Salmón's "No Word," on the fact that his native Rarámuri language has no word for wild — because there was never a line dividing people from nature in the first place. (Robin Wall Kimmerer has an essay in here too.)
Healing with Medicinal Plants of the West — Cecilia Garcia and James D. Adams. The best Native American medicinal text I know of for our immediate corner of Southern California, with a great deal on the Chumash and their system of medicine. Most of us live on Gabrieleño, Tongva, or Kizh land; the Chumash are our neighbors out toward Malibu.
The Abundance of Less — Andy Couturier. Lessons in simple living drawn from conversations with people in rural Japan, several of them gardeners. A quiet, grounding book for anyone trying to round out how they think about sustainability and a good life.
Hands in the dirt — practical and California reference
The New Organic Grower — Eliot Coleman. Tools and techniques for the home and market gardener. Practical, trustworthy, and well-worn on my shelf.
Trowel and Error — Sharon Lovejoy. Over 700 organic tips, remedies, and shortcuts. I don't agree with every single one, but it's a fun, useful book if you like finding clever, natural ways of doing things.
Sunset Western Garden Book and the California Master Gardener Handbook. Two deep references written for the way we actually garden in California. Most of us reach for the internet these days, but there's something steadying about looking things up in a book that isn't a screen — just remember the older editions won't reflect everything that's changed since they were printed.
For the teachers among us
Asphalt to Ecosystems — Sharon Gamson Danks. If you're a teacher, a parent, a grandparent, or anyone hoping to turn a patch of schoolyard into something living, this is the book. It's full of ideas for transforming hard ground into a garden.
Environmental and sustainability classics
I've put these toward the end on purpose — they're a little heavier, but they matter.
A Sand County Almanac — Aldo Leopold. The essential text on the land ethic — Leopold's idea that we belong to a community that includes the soil, the water, the plants, and the animals, and that we owe it something. If you want to think seriously about our relationship to the land, start here.
Silent Spring — Rachel Carson. A classic, and not always an easy read. Some of the science is dated and she wasn't right about everything — but Carson is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement, and it's worth understanding where that movement came from.
The Invention of Nature — Andrea Wulf. The story of Alexander von Humboldt, with an appendix tracing how so many figures in the environmental movement connect back to him. A great one for anyone who wants to follow the threads further.
Thought of the Week
I've been looking at that list of books, and I keep thinking about everything that isn't on it.
The books are only part of the story. The list above helped shape how I see the world — but so did dozens of others I didn't name, and the studies I've read, and the teachers I've learned from, and every person I've sat with, talked to, and argued with along the way. I am the sum of all of it.
And here's the thing I want you to take from this issue more than any single title: books are not the only way to gather knowledge. The classroom is not the only way. Conversation is not the only way. We can walk into the garden, or the woods, and learn by paying attention — watching what the plants and the soil and the seasons are doing, and learning from our own experience. That's how Indigenous peoples have learned for generations, and really, it's how all of our ancestors first learned, long before any of it was written down.
We also learn through disagreement. When someone sees a thing differently than you do, that isn't automatically a problem to be won — it's an opportunity. Conversation and debate are some of the best tools we have for testing our own assumptions and finding the soft spots in our thinking. But they only work if we come to them honestly. None of us is infallible. We all carry mistaken ideas and bad information from time to time — I certainly have, more times than I could count, and nearly every one of those mistakes is how I actually learned something.
That's why I've come to believe that one of the most valuable things you can bring to anything is a humble mind. I'm the professor here, I know — but some of the wisest counsel I ever received is this: the more you study, the more clearly you see the size of what you don't know. As my own knowledge has grown, I've only come to understand how little I understand. The more I learn, the less I know.
That isn't a reason to stop learning. It's a reason to keep going — gently, and without too much certainty. Come to every conversation, every argument, every debate willing to say four honest words: I might be wrong. And hold on to two truths that have taken the pressure off more than anything else: we don't have to know everything, and we don't have to be right all the time. We're all just walking this road called life, learning as we go.
Well — if you've made it this far through my philosophical ramblings, you've earned one more recommendation. Read Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse. It's the story of a man who goes looking for wisdom and slowly learns that it can't simply be handed to him by teachers or books — that some things have to be lived, and found on your own, by the river. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of everything I just said.
See you next Sunday.
