The Gardener's Year

   While reading Eric Grissel's excellent Insects and Gardens (Timber Press, 2001) I was intrigued to come across a book titled A Gardener's Year, which Grissel describes as "possibility the best gardening book ever written." The author Karel Capek was unknown to me, but given such high praise, how could I resist? Through an Amazon.com search, I soon found a good used copy so I could to see for myself. The Gardener's Year was published in 1929 and Modern Library has brought out a new English edition for spring 2002.

   In addition to being a man of letters, Capek was evidently a passionate gardener and in The Gardener's Year (illustrated with clever line drawings by his artist brother Josef), he celebrates gardeners in all their contradictions. Anyone who has gardened or loves someone who does will laugh in recognition. There is the bum in the air - why should a gardener even have back, Capek asks. Would it not be more practical to be some kind of invertebrate?

   The book is made up of a series of humorous and wise essays that take us from January, the month when gardeners have little else to do but "cultivate the weather," through the adventures of the growing season with all its highs and lows.

   There is April, when the gardener "runs around his little garden twenty times looking for an inch of soil where nothing is growing." Soon, there is the fretting that starts after a week of fine days, when "we look anxiously at the sky and say to one another as we meet, 'It ought to rain.'" Of course, the terrible peony smashing downpours of June follow: "Next day the newspapers describe the catastrophic cloud-burst which has caused terrible damage to the new crops; but they do not say that it has caused heavy damage especially to the lilies, or that it has ruined the Papaver orientale. We gardeners are always neglected."

   In summer there is the experiment with the vegetable garden, quickly abandoned in favor in of the local farmers market: "In due time it was obvious that I must crunch every day one hundred and twenty radishes, because nobody else in the house would eat them; the next day I was drowning in savoys, and then the orgies in kohlrabi followed. There were weeks when I was forced to chew lettuce three times a day, to avoid throwing it away."

   Through the book, the passing of time provides a poignant undercurrent to the gardener's thoughts. "What a pity, my sweet beauty (I am talking of flowers), what a pity that time is so fleeting; beauty comes to an end, and only the gardener remains," he writes, adding with some truth that "the gardener's autumn begins in March with the first faded snowdrop."

   However, gardeners who get depressed each autumn contemplating the onslaught of winter would do well to match Capek's optimistic outlook. For him this is a time of promise because it already embodies the coming spring: "Leaves wither because winter begins; but they also wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny as percussion caps out of which the spring will crack."

   Capek's understanding of gardeners' psychology (or is it our psychopathology?) is astute: "We gardeners live somehow for the future," he declares. "If the roses are in flower, we think that next year they will flower better; and in some few years this little spruce will become a tree-if only those few years behind me! I should like to see what those birches will be like in fifty years..the best is in front of us. Each successive year will add growth and beauty. Thank God that again we shall be one year farther on!"