“The Gardener’s Year” by Karel Čapek is not a “How-To” book by any means, rather it’s a reflection of what it is to be a gardener. It is a short book of 160 or so pages, comprising 26 chapters, filled with humorous insights about gardening over the course of a year, with simple cartoon-like illustrations by his brother Josef. It won’t teach you much about gardening, there are many other books that will do that, but it will help you understand why gardeners love gardening so much.
Čapek is better known for having coined the word “Robot” appearing in his play “R.U.R.” first performed in 1921. The “Gardener’s Year” published later, in 1929, by which time Čapek was firmly established in his reputation as a writer, affording him the means to keep a modest garden of a quarter acre in a Prague neighborhood, sharing it with his brother Josef. In this interwar period, shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929, it is estimated that some 50-65% of Czechs used their gardens for growing food; or if they could not afford a garden, they could pay a minimal rent to lease an allotment. The Capek brothers, therefore, were fortunate indeed to be able to maintain the garden described in the book; a garden featuring numerous perennials, bulbs, a rock garden, and a greenhouse.
Every chapter brings the reader fresh ways of looking at gardening. Čapek writes about the things that you didn’t know you already knew, and experiences that you’ve probably felt but couldn’t put into words. He tackles each subject with genuine insight. Consider the chapter “The Blessed Rain.”
The hissing downpour stops, as if one pulled a string; the earth shines with silver vapour, a blackbird shouts in a bush and plays mad pranks; we also want to kick our heels, but instead we go out with bare heads to breathe in the fresh and sparkling humidity of the air and earth.
The book’s chapters are filled with garden imagery like this, making it the ideal bedside book to read before you turn in. And if you suffer from insomnia and can switch on the light without disturbing the dog, you might want to read a chapter or two to divert your mind from whatever woke you up.
Writing as he did a hundred years ago, about a climate and soil unlike that of New England’s, it may seem that some of his ideas are no longer relevant; his description of how to eradicate green-fly would certainly not pass muster these days. But bear in mind that he writes this to poke fun at the marketing of simplistic panaceas, not dissimilar to what one might find a Tik-Tok influencer promoting (and with equally futile results)!
For this there are various powders, preparations, tinctures, extracts, infusions, and fumigations, arsenic, tobacco, soft soap, and other poisons, which the gardener tries one after the other, as soon as he notices that on the roses the green and succulent lice have seriously increased. If you use these expedients with a certain care, and in due quantity, you will find that the roses sometimes survive this destruction uninjured, except the leaves and buds, which look somewhat blasted, while the plant-lice thrive under this treatment so that they cover the twigs like dense embroidery.
Čapek takes great delight in making fun of problems that will be familiar to all gardeners; be it poring over seed catalogs and ordering far more than you can use; the pursuit of a unique specimen and, having found it, searching in vain for a place where you can plant it; or turning the soil and having to fight with the roots and rocks and assorted debris. Consider the life lessons he draws from his gardening; as relevant today as they were then.
The man who is the owner of some yards of land, and is growing something on it, becomes in fact a rather conservative creature, for he is dependent on natural laws a thousand years old; do what you will, no revolution will hasten the time of germination, or allow the lilac to flower before May; so the man becomes wise and submits to laws and customs.
This is a book that you’ll want to own and lend out to other gardeners. Although available on Kindle and softcover, I recommend you buy the hardcover edition. It’s a small book with ribbon marker, solidly bound on high-quality paper. You can find new and lightly used copies on your favorite used book site.