Product Description

From the internationally acclaimed Czech writer Karel Capek comes this beautifully written and marvelously apt account of the trials and tribulations of the gardener’s life. First published in Prague in 1929, The Gardener’s Year combines a richly comic portrait of life in the garden, narrated month by month, with a series of delightful illustrations by the author’s older brother and collaborator, Josef. Capek’s gardeners—all too human, despite their lofty aspirations—often look the fool, whether they be found sopping wet, victims of the cobralike water hose, or hunched over, hands immersed in the soil, “presenting their rumps to the splendid azure sky.” In their repeated folly, Capek gives us not only cause for laughter but also, in the end, “testimony of the imperishable and miraculous optimism of the human race.”

This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorialist and the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #151447 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-19
• Released on: 2002-02-19
• Original language: Czech
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
“There was no writer like him.” —Arthur Miller

“A charming and loving chronicle of the Czechoslovak playwright’s backyard garden in Prague. . . . [A] funny but meaty little book.” —The New York Times

“Capek’s work has lost nothing of its freshness and luster.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the Back Cover
“There was no writer like him.” —Arthur Miller

“A charming and loving chronicle of the Czechoslovak playwright’s backyard garden in Prague. . . . [A] funny but meaty little book.” —The New York Times

“Capek’s work has lost nothing of its freshness and luster.” —The New York Times Book Review

About the Author
Karen Capek is widely considered the greatest Czech author of the first half of the twentieth century. A novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist, he was a strong dissident voice during the period of fascist buildup in Europe between the World Wars. Most famous for his play R.U.R., which coined the word “robot,” he wrote a number of satires, as well as the utopian fantasy novel War with the Newts. He died in 1938.

Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire and Second Nature, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Pollan chose the books for the Modern Library Gardening series because, as he writes, “these writers are some of the great talkers in the rich, provocative, and frequently uproarious conversation that, metaphorically at least, has been taking place over the back fence of our gardens at least since the time of Pliny.”

Customer Reviews

Eternal spring....
I don't know much about Czech literature, so I don't know if the Prague Spring had anything to do with the writing of Karel Capek, but I would not be surprised to discover a connection. "Leaves wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny percussion caps out of which the spring will crack....if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd and that the best thing of all is to be..living.."

Karel Capek wrote those words in 1929 when he was 39 years old. By 1938, the year the Nazis invaded Prague, he was dead. His brother Josef died a few years later in Bergan-Belsen. But this book is not about those sad events. This book is about a year in the life of a good gardener, how ever extraordinary a writer he might have been.

During his lifetime, Capek realized that humans were becoming enslaved by fascism and run-amuck technology. The ancient and cyclical daily practices of humans were dying before his eyes --the beet farmers stacking their fall harvests at the railroad stations; the wagon loads of manure that could be delivered for garden beds; the nursury men who understood plants giving way to "market garden centers" staffed by those who regularly misidentify plants and stocked with items that "move" (produce a high volume of sales).

THE GARDENER'S YEAR is a reflective book. You don't have to garden to appreciate it, but if you garden, you will probably laugh on more than one occasion. Where is the gardener who has not struggled with a hose; Who has not looked with greed on a bald spot and attempted to squeeze six more phlox plants in, only to discover a dormant sping plant; And, where is the gardener who has not wandered about the yard with a plant in each hand trying to find just one more place for a perennial. Capek understood the gardener's soul. We are a greedy lot, obsessed with dirt, happy in a wagon load of s___, and hostile to many-legged life forms, but, we are also the best sort of human beings who understand the meaning and importance of life.

Capek's writing reminds me of that of Henry Mitchell who wrote two columns (one on gardening the other on "everyday" philosophy) for the Washington Post. Like Mitchell Capek had the gift of converting his own gardening experiences into tales that inform, enlighten, and illustrate the best and the worst of human nature. "I tell you there is no death, not even sleep. We only pass from one season to another. We must be patient with life, for it is eternal."

Amazon's Review is Totally Off Base.
There is humor and self-deprecation in The Gardener's Year...This is a book that will appeal to the gardener, the philospher, and the Zen deotee, the reader of self-help books, as well as the humorist. Here are quotes: "After his death, the gardener does not become a butterfly but ... a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous and spicey delights of the soil." "I find a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil". "The life of a gardener is active and full of will." There are easy references to German philosophers, campanula alpina, Tolstoy, the perfume of manure. All this is presented with humor but there are no fools in this book. It could easily be subtitled "Zen and the Pleasant Art of Gardening." It didn't change my life, but it made it better. For Godsake, by this book!