I'm skeptical of binary, black and white thinking -- of the idea, for instance, that the grotesque events of September 11th instantly altered every aspect of life, radically and permanently changed the way we think and talk, changed what TV shows or books or plays or music or films we will or won't enjoy from now on.

We’re hearing an awful lot right now that the terrorist attacks and the war to come are so dreadful that public frivolity will no longer wash, that "irony is dead."

Two weeks ago, according to this new script, none of us took anything seriously, every piece of art and entertainment and media was giddy and goofy.

And from now on, according to the same script, all of us will take everything deadly seriously, and every piece of art and entertainment and media will be sentimental or grim or inspirational but in any case absolutely earnest.

I don't think so.

Eighteen months ago everyone was saying that the Internet had changed everything. And then we realized that putatively 180-degree paradigm shift wasn't quite real.

The Internet was and is an extraordinary new technological wonder, but it did not change overnight the ways people and societies and economies behave. And I don't think this extraordinary catastrophe will either.

I'm not saying nothing has changed. A friend of mine who's a TV news executive was passionately telling me the other night how his priorities have been shifted by the disaster, that he suddenly doesn't care very much any more about ratings and profits.

But I also heard another TV executive I know suggesting, guiltlessly, that the deaths of 6,000 people in the World Trade Center presented a great opportunity for a certain show on his network.

And as shocking as the second executive's cynicism was at first, I realized I also found the fact of it perversely reassuring.

Reassuring because it showed me that for all of our sadness and shock and fear at this moment, life is going on, in all of its shades and flavors, from the venal and tasteless to the heroic and noble.

Life goes on, I realized with pleasure last week, days after the attack, when the farmers who come in trucks with their produce to East 16th Street in Manhattan were back, selling us tomatoes and basil and sweet corn.

Life goes on. My friend and fellow New Yorker Alice Trillin happened to die after a long illness the day after the attacks, having just returned from Novia Scotia, where she had insisted on spending her last summer, as she spent every summer, in her garden tending her peas and peonies.

Life does go on, I felt with the absolute cleansing certainty of a deep breath, when I finally got out of this shocked, confused city and spent last weekend sitting in a sunny garden in upstate New York.

In our garden in the Clove Valley, nothing had changed since the 11th. The angelica and echinacea and sunflowers are still blooming. The lavender and Russian sage are still fragrant. And the old apple tree, one limb propped up by a crutch, still has its fruit, perfect to eat right this instant.

Nature is such a pleasure at a moment like this because it's so sweet and alive and unchanging -- because nature is oblivious to our confusion and dread.

And gardens seem particularly consoling because they are a corner of the wild world made orderly.

Which brings us to our cover story today -- the art and culture of the garden, from poems and songs and paintings inspired by the outdoors to the real things, gardens themselves. With me today to help figure all this out is Michael Pollan, the garden philosopher and author of the bestselling book Botany of Desire.