I am slowly becoming a gardener. As a child I always helped in the garden, always weeded and watered and fertilized as directed but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started taking an active interest in gardening. Even when all I had was my little balcony in Calgary, how exciting it was to choose my plants! To plant and care for them! Even dead-heading became a sacred occupation, and I picked wilted petunia blossoms off with unrivalled discipline and care, snipped off browning roses with manic zeal.
And now that I have a real garden to work in – and a climate that doesn’t feel the need to have frosts in July and August – my enthusiasm has only grown, along with my anxiety. I read The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek (a good Czech and friend of my great-grandfather and, yes, I’m bragging about that because it is pretty darn cool and I’ve relatively few connections to literary figures, aside from Alice Munro) in early June, just as the garden was coming to life and oh, what a perfect book and what a perfect time to read it!
The Gardener’s Year is a selection of humourous essays on a year in the life of a gardener. It is very much about the gardener and his stresses and joys rather than the garden itself, which is what makes it so very enjoyable and timeless. Even new as I am to the obsession, my own recent gardening plights, the missteps and mistakes that were weighing heavily on my soul, were perfectly echoed by Čapek, as though he had been in the garden witnessing my incompetence only a few days previously:
…nobody knows how it happens, but it occurs strikingly often that when you step on a bed to pick up some dry twig, or to pull out a dandelion, you usually tread on a shoot of the lily or trollius; it crunches under your foot, and you sicken with horror and shame; and you take yourself for a monster under whose hooves grass will not grow. Or with infinite care you loosen the soil in a bed, with the inevitable result that you chop with the hoe a germinating bulb, or neatly cut off with the spade the sprouts of anemones; when, horrified, you start back, you crush with your paw a primula in flower, or break the young plume of a delphinium. The more anxiously you work, the more damage you make; only years of practice will teach you the mysteries and bold certainty of a real gardener, who treads at random, and yet tramples on nothing; or if he does, at least he doesn’t mind. (p. 51)
As June has progresses and I’ve watched unusually savage rains beat the petals off my snapdragons and cosmos and cold snaps stunt my roses, I’ve often thought back on Čapek’s gardener’s prayer (and repeated it, to little effect):
If it were of any use, every day the gardener would fall on his knees and pray somehow like this: ‘O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak it; grant that at the same time it would not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthemum, lavender, and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought-loving plants – I will write their names of a bit of paper if you like – and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not everywhere (not, for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron), and not too much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant lice and snails, no mildew, and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven. Amen.’ (p. 82-83)
The illustrations by Josef Čapek are no less delightful than the text, particularly the ones featuring the gardener as contortionist, hunched and bent and stretched entirely out of shape in order to service each unreachable corner of garden.
Whether he’s lamenting the weather, lampooning the holidaying gardener’s instructions to his substitute or considering the traitorous and unpredictable nature of the garden hose, Čapek is always light-hearted, charming and, above all, affectionate. He is able to recognize and brilliantly capture the ridiculous habits and mindsets of gardeners but he can only do it with such skill and accuracy because he is one himself and thinks as they think, feels as they feel. Or, I suppose I should now say as a gardener, however amateur, as we think, as we feel:
Let no man 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. (p. 13)
This sounds like a perfect book!
It really is!
Karel sounds like a sage.
He was that. His writing is so varied too, which I love. Fairy tales, gardening books, science fiction – he wasn’t one to be pigeon-holed!
I am, you see, stricken with the incurable malady known as garden fever and the only thing that will sooth me, other than gardening, is a good book on gardening. You now have me quite curious about Karel Capek’s book and eager to seek it out and read its pages. Thank you.
This is the best book about gardeners and gardening that I’ve read yet, surpassing even my beloved Elizabeth and Her German Garden!
Right, am ordering this book as soon as possible! He sounds absolutely delightful… well, related to you isn’t he? 🙂
Do order it! I borrowed it from the library but I am on the lookout now for a copy of my own to add to my personal library. Čapek is delightful but I can’t claim any relationship to him. He was friends with my great-grandfather (they went to school together and corresponded until Čapek’s death) but that’s enough for me!