Karel Čapek

Karel Čapek's The Gardener's Year was first published in 1929. It's brilliantly funny; it's timeless; and it's clearly the work of a Hard Core Gardener, as we see when Čapek waxes rhapsodic about his favorite soil amendment:

A cartload of manure is most beautiful when it is brought on a frosty day, so that it steams like a sacrificial altar. When its fragrance reaches heaven, He who understands all things sniffs and says: "Um, that's some nice manure."—Here, of course, we have an opportunity to talk of the mysterious cycle of life; a horse chews oats, and then he sends them on to the carnations or roses, which next year will praise God for the gift with such a sweet perfume that is beyond description. This sweet perfume the gardener notices already in the reeking and strawy heap of manure; and he sniffs approvingly, and he carefully spreads this gift of God over the whole garden as he were spreading marmalade on his child's bread. Here you are, little chum, may you enjoy it! To you, Mrs. Herriot, I shall give a whole pile, because you flowered so finely and richly; you, feverfew, will get this cake to keep you quiet; and with this brown straw I will make a bed for you, you zealous phlox.

Good people, why do you screw up your face? Don't you like my smell?

(I deeply regret not being able to include the accompanying illustration by Karel's brother and best friend, Josef, which depicts the steaming pile, from which a plume of flowers and stars wafts to the skies.)

Karel Čapek was a Czech writer whose most widely known work, the play "RUR", brought us the word "robot". As garden seasons came and went, he wrote and worked and warned against Communism (in the prescient "Why I am not a Communist", in 1924) and the rise of Nazi Germany. It is said that he would have received the Nobel Prize in Literature if the academy had not been so nervous about agitating Hitler by giving the award to a noted anti-fascist. He died of influenza on Christmas day in 1938, three months before the Nazi annexation. Had he lived, he would have been on the short list for arrest by the Gestapo. His brother Josef was arrested, and died in a concentration camp in 1945. The end of the war brought decades of Communist repression, as foreseen and forewarned by Čapek.

So when I read A Gardener's Year, it's with a smile through misty eyes. I hope their garden gave the Čapeks a few moments of beauty and peace when all the world was going to hell around them, and I hope that I can do them honor by sharing this hope:

The future is not in front of us, for it is here already in the shape of a germ; already it is with us; and what is not with us will not be even in the future. We don't see germs because they are under the earth; we don't know the future because it is within us. Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many fat and white shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil, which is called the present day; how many seeds germinate in secret; how many old plants draw themselves together and concentrate into a living bud, which one day will burst into flowering life—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 a living man—that is, a man who grows.

The Gardener's Year. Karel Čapek. (trans. M. and R. Weatherall) Dover Publications, Inc., 1963.

Comments

[Kathy]

I bet there's a lot of people who know his "Gardener's Prayer" without knowing that he was the author of it.

[Stefanie]

Sounds wonderful. I will have to add this one to my list!

[Dave]

useful article on Capek here: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=728