JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2005

With winter now in full bloom, I was moved to wax poetic on the subject until I recalled that Czech author Karel Capek had already covered it back in 1929 and there was really nothing more for me (or any garden writer) to say. A collection of monthly essays interspersed with commentary on whatever caught his fancy, Capek’s book The Gardener’s Year was reprinted by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1984. Since it’s the most delightful gardening book on the planet, I’m happy to report that it’s still in print.

Discussing weather in his meditation on January, he begins by stating, "There is something peculiar about the weather: it is never quite right"—a sentiment any Midwestern gardener can appreciate. He then proceeds to describe the horrors of what he calls "black frosts" when the earth freezes solid and there is presumably no snow cover. "If I knew that it would help, I would wrap my holly in my own coat, and draw my pants over the juniper; I would take off my own shirt for you, Azalea pontica; I would cover you with my hat, Alum Root, and for you, Coreopsis, nothing is left but my socks: be thankful for them." The droll little drawing that illustrates this and other passages in the book was the work of Capek’s brother Josef.

In February, he discusses garden catalogs as one sure sign that spring is coming. "Although the gardener knows them by heart (just as the Iliad begins with ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles,’ the catalogs begin with the words: Acaena, Acantholimon, Acanthus, Achillea, Aconitum, Adenophora, Adonis, and so on, as every gardener knows), yet he reads them carefully from Acaena to Wahlenbergia or Yucca, at war with himself over the question of re-orders."

He mentions other signs of approaching spring: crocuses and snowdrops of course, but most charmingly, the neighbors. "As soon as they bustle out into their gardens with spades and hoes, shears and bast, tree-washes, and powders for the soil, an experienced gardener knows that spring is at hand; he puts on his old trousers and bustles out into the garden with spade and hoe, so that his neighbors also know that spring is coming, and they shout the joyful news to one another over the hedges."

It’s not easy for a writer to be both amusing and sentimental in the same sentence. Nor is it a simple matter to write a gardening tract steeped in local peculiarities that’s universal in its truths. The Gardener’s Year is such a book, and there is no better way to start our own gardening year by reading (or re-reading) this timeless gem.

Illustration by Josef Capek, From Capek, Karel. The Gardener's Year. Copyright 1966 George Allen & Unwin, LTD. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.