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    The Gardener's Year
    The Gardener's Year
    The Gardener's Year
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    The Gardener's Year

    By Karel Capek and Josef Capek

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "This very entertaining volume with its delightfully humorous pictures should be read by all gardeners." — Nature
    "Mr. Čapek writes with sympathy, understanding, and humor." — The New York Times
    "Has a mellowness and a charm that give it a high place in the humorous literature of gardening … will delight the amateur gardener, and indeed everyone else." — Saturday Review
    The creator of this book is best known internationally as the author of R.U.R., the science-fiction play that introduced the term "robot" to the world. Karel Čapek's satiric gifts take a different turn in this impishly comic book, which recounts the trials, labors, joys, and meditations of the amateur gardener.
    Rather than a how-to book, Čapek's volume offers a lighthearted mock-treatise on the pains and rewards of tending a small and resistant garden plot. From January to December, the author and his brother, illustrator Josef Čapek, trace the vagaries of the amateur horticulturist's year, with brief side notes on seeds, the soil, plants, the beauties of autumn, and other aspects of gardening. Fifty-nine delightful drawings complement this book, which will amuse readers with and without green thumbs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJul 24, 2017
    ISBN9780486824376
    The Gardener's Year
    Author

    Karel Capek

    Karel Capek was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia. He was interested in visual art as a teenager and studied philosophy and aesthetics in Prague. During WWI he was exempt from military service because of spinal problems and became a journalist. He campaigned against the rise of communism and in the 1930s his writing became increasingly anti-fascist. He started writing fiction with his brother Josef, a successful painter, and went on to publish science-fiction novels, for which he is best known, as well as detective stories, plays and a singular book on gardening, The Gardener’s Year. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times and the Czech PEN Club created a literary award in his name. He died of pneumonia in 1938.

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    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Famous Czech author Karel Capek entertains readers with a month-by-month rendering of real life gardening. He totally enjoys getting carried away in his subject, making a case for October actually being Spring for gardeners, as well for the "Now!" of buds, and the steaming glory of a newly delivered mound of fresh manure. His humor combines well with his brother Josef's line drawing interpretations until "the malice of human souls" deforms their country courtesy of The Munich Pact.Though Karel Capek often mentions women favorably, all his fellow gardenersare male. No reason is offered though maybe this was standard in the early 20th century...?He once raised vegetables to the tune of crunching "...every day one hundred and twenty radishes,because no one else would eat them...." He further admits that he has become tenderhearted about eating what he has grown: "If I were obliged to eat my roses or nibble the flowers of lilies-of-the-valley, I think I should lose the respect which I have towards them." And they toward him!
    • 4/5
      Originally published in Czech in 1929 and published in English in 1931, The Gardener's Year is a collection of droll essays arranged to correspond to months of the year. Capek gently pokes fun at the desire of gardeners to start digging before the soil is ready in the Spring; to wish (always) for more rain; to become obsessed by particular plants, or rather all plants; to prefer soil and manure to flowers. A few passages are laugh-out-loud funny; a few are profound; most are good-natured and facetious. My 1984 University of Wisconsin Press edition has illustrations, apparently reprinted from the first edition, drawn by Capek's brother Josef Capek. These look disconcertingly like inferior versions of James Thurber cartoons, but pre-date them.
    • 4/5
      A very sweet little book about a man and his garden. I chuckled my way through this, and as an avid gardener it was easy to recognize myself in what was described. Who hasn't bought a ton of plants that one just "must have" only to find that there is hardly any space left in the garden to plant them. I'm sure this would make a very popular gift to people who love gardening. I also loved the humorous illustrations.
    • 5/5
      Although I am a rather clumsy gardener and I am plagued by rabbits and gophers and deer ( oh my!), I do share Capek's enthusiasm for gardening.
      I re-read this book every year. It inspires me and gives me solace in the long dark days of Winter.
      This is a light-hearted introduction to the work of Karel Capek, one of the best European writers from the last century.
    • 5/5
      Ein amüsantes, kurzweiliges Buch über den Autor und seinen Garten, dem man fast gar nicht anmerkt, dass es schon 1929 erschienen ist. Man wird kein besserer Gärtner durch das Buch, aber sehr gut unterhalten.

    Book preview

    The Gardener's Year - Karel Capek

    LIFE

    HOW LITTLE GARDENS ARE LAID OUT

    THERE ARE several different ways in which to lay out a little garden; the best way is to get a gardener. The gardener will put up a number of sticks, twigs, and broomsticks, and will assure you that these are maples, hawthorns, lilacs, standard and bush roses, and other natural species; then he will dig the soil, turn it over, and pat it again; he will make little paths of rubble, stick here and there into the ground some faded foliage, and declare that these are the perennials; he will sow seeds for the future lawn, which he will call English rye grass and bent grass, fox-tail, dog’s-tail, and cat’s-tail grass; and then he will depart leaving the garden brown and naked, as it was on the first day of the creation of the world; and he will warn you that every day you should carefully water all this soil of the earth, and when the grass peeps out you must order some gravel for the paths. Very well then.

    One would think that watering a little garden is quite a simple thing, especially if one has a hose. It will soon be clear that until it has been tamed a hose is an extraordinarily evasive and dangerous beast, for it contorts itself, it jumps, it wriggles, it makes puddles of water, and dives with delight into the mess it has made; then it goes for the man who is going to use it and coils itself round his legs; you must hold it down with your foot, and then it rears and twists round your waist and neck, and while you are fighting with it as with a cobra, the monster turns up its brass mouth and projects a mighty stream of water through the windows onto the curtains which have been recently hung. You must grasp it firmly, and hold it tight; the beast rears with pain, and begins to spout water, not from the mouth, but from the hydrant and from somewhere in the middle of its body. Three men at least are needed to tame it at first, and they all leave the place of battle splashed to the ears with mud and drenched with water; as to the garden itself, in parts it has changed into greasy pools, while in other places it is cracking with thirst.

    If you do this every day, in a fortnight weeds will spring up instead of grass. This is one of Nature’s mysteries—how from the best grass seed most luxuriant and hairy weeds come up; perhaps weed seed ought to be sown and then a nice lawn would result. In three weeks the lawn is thickly overgrown with thistles and other pests, creeping, or rooted a foot deep in the earth; if you want to pull them out they break off at the root, or they bring up whole lumps of soil with them. It’s like this: the more of a nuisance the more they stick to life.

    In the meantime, through a mysterious metamorphosis of matter, the rubble of the paths has changed into the most sticky and greasy clay that you can imagine.

    Nevertheless, weeds in the lawn must be rooted out; you are weeding and weeding, and behind your steps the future lawn turns into naked and brown earth as it was on the first day of the creation of the world. Only on one or two spots something like a greenish mould appears, something thin like mist, and scanty, and very like down; that’s grass, certainly. You walk around it on tiptoe, and chase away the sparrows; and while you are peering into the earth, on the gooseberry and currant bushes the first little leaves have broken forth, all unawares; Spring is always too quick for you.

    Your relation towards things has changed. If it rains you say that it rains on the garden; if the sun shines, it does not shine just anyhow, but it shines on the garden; in the evening you rejoice that the garden will rest.

    One day you will open your eyes and the garden will be green, long grass will glisten with dew, and from the tangled tops of the roses swollen and crimson buds will peep forth; and the trees will be old, and their crowns will be dark and heavy and widely spread, with a musty smell in their damp shade. And you will remember no more the slender, naked, brown little garden of those days, the uncertain down of the first grass, the first pinched buds, and all the earthy, poor, and touching beauty of a garden which is being laid out.

    Very well, but now you must water and weed, and pick the stones out of the soil.

    HOW A MAN BECOMES A GARDENER

    ODD AS it may appear, a gardener does not grow from seed, shoot, bulb, rhizome, or cutting, but from experience, surroundings, and natural conditions. When I was a little boy I had towards my father’s garden a rebellious and even a vindictive attitude, because I was not allowed to tread on the beds and pick the unripe fruit. Just in the same way Adam was not allowed to tread on the beds and pick the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, because it was not yet ripe; but Adam—just like us children—picked the unripe fruit, and therefore was expelled from the Garden of Eden; since then the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has always been unripe.

    While one is in the prime of youth one thinks that a flower is what one carries in a buttonhole, or presents to a girl; one somehow does not rightly understand that a flower is something which hibernates, which is dug round and manured, watered and transplanted, divided and trimmed, tied up, freed from weeds, and cleaned of seeds, dead leaves, aphis, and mildew; instead of digging the garden one runs after girls, satisfies one’s ambition, eats the fruit of life which one has not produced oneself, and, on the whole, behaves destructively. A certain maturity, or let us say paternity, is necessary for a man to become an amateur gardener. Besides, you must have your own garden. Usually you have it laid out by an expert, and you think that you will go and look at it when the day’s work is over, and enjoy the flowers, and listen to the chirping of the birds. One day you may plant one little flower with your own hand; I planted a house-leek. Perhaps a bit of soil will get into your body through the quick, or in some other way, and cause blood-poisoning or inflammation. One claw and the whole bird is caught. Another time you may catch it from your neighbors; you see that a campion is flowering in your neighbor’s garden, and you say: By Jove! Why shouldn’t it grow in mine as well? I’m blessed if I can’t do better than that. From such beginnings the gardener yields more and more to this newly awakened passion, which is nourished by repeated success and spurred on by each new failure; the passion of the collector bursts out in him, driving him to raise everything according to the alphabet from Acæna to Zauschneria; then a craze for specialization breaks out in him, which makes of a hitherto normal being a rose—dahlia—or some other sort of exalted maniac. Others fall victims to an artistic passion, and continually alter and rearrange their beds, devise color schemes, move shrubs, and change whatever stands or grows, urged on by a creative discontent. Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.

    I will

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