Synopsis
Karel Capek's The Gardener's Year is a timeless classic of wit and wisdom, sure to capture the heart and imagination of every gardener—indeed, everyone who has pursued any hobby with a passion that occasionally overrides good common sense. Originally published more that fifty years ago in Czechoslovakia, it transcends the years with grace and ease. Whether Capek is talking about the lack or surfeit of rain, the fruitless search for space to plant just a few more perennials, or the unfathomable mystery of the green thumb, his words strike chord upon chord within every gardener, in every time and place. Fifty-eight sprightly drawings by Karel Capek's brother Josef Capek, lend themselves perfectly to the artful simplicity and humour of this book.
Through the year, Capek does battle with the garden hose, learns the value of patience in spring, prays to the Lord for rain (but only on certain parts of the garden, please), buys far too many plants at every opportunity, curses raspberry canes that invade from his neighbor's garden, routs stones from the soil (they seem to grow from spores), and agonizes continually about the garden while he is on vacation in August. In short, Karel Capek is a gardener, timeless, with all the frailties, hope, and boundless optimism necessarily shared by all gardeners. After the sun sets, he leans on his spade and sighs with deep content: "I have sweated today!"
New Yorker
With the coming of spring, the Modern Library recently began a new series of classic books on gardening, literary excursions on the art and ethos of gardens, which the general editor of the series, Michael Pollan, likens to a conversation that "takes place over the back fence that joins any two gardens in the world." Perhaps the most delightful of the first crop is The Gardener's Year, from 1929, written by the great Czech author and playwright Karel Capek and illustrated by his brother Josef. While Capek pays lip service to the well-established month-by-month almanac of garden tasks, his true subject is the stubborn monomaniacal nature of gardeners themselves. "Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation," he writes. "It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart." Real gardeners, it turns out, are oblivious to the pretty things that ordinary people admire; they concentrate instead on controlling the earth. A gardener in Eden would probably "forget to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; he would rather look round to see how he could manage to take away from the Lord some barrowloads of the paradisaic soil."
Evidence that the over-the-fence conversation of literary gardeners continues as volubly as ever can be found in James Fenton's A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Starting from the premise that, in the received wisdom of garden planning, "design has become a terrible, stupid, and expensive tyrant," Fenton encourages his readers to buy seeds, plant them, and see what happens. Contemptuous of the "color snobbery" of garden writers, he evinces a fondness for bright orange. Ideally, he feels, gardens need make no statement more consequential than "This is what I felt like having this year." (Leo Carey)