MARCH/APRIL 1999

If you ever read Art Kozelka’s columns from season to season and through the years, you started to recognize the advice, the methods he recommended, the plants he favored. Every spring you could count on hearing that you need more of the minor bulbs, not just tulips and daffodils. Every late summer you could count on the lecture about how to dig, split, and replant peonies.

Each essay in the Chicago Tribune had a certain flow, a tone that was neither chastising nor deprecating but that definitely left you with the impression you needed to do something now. He wrote cleanly, sparingly. Kozelka worked for the Tribune from 1947 to 1976 in various newsroom capacities, including garden writer. When he turned 65 and tried to retire, managing editor Bill Jones called Art in and asked if he would continue writing his columns. “Surprised the hell out of me,” Kozelka would recall many times in years following.

He wrote twice weekly for many years and after his “retirement,” then once a week until the Tribune redesigned a section that didn’t include his column. There was no easy way to tell a legend that the paper wanted to go another direction. Although slowed by arthritis in his hands, Kozelka still enjoyed the writing, still enjoyed grumbling about how long it took to receive his meager free-lance wages or how poorly his column was placed in the section.

I was introduced to Kozelka as a Tribune copy editor. His columns came through a desk I worked on and, being a new homeowner, I would volunteer to edit them. Later, I met Kozelka and discovered he lived four blocks away. We became friends a few years later when he broke his wrist in a fall on ice and couldn’t drive downtown to turn in his columns. I became his transportation during that time and for several years following.

It was during those years that I was asked to research Art’s background to support a nomination as a member of the Hall of Fame of the Garden Writers Association of America. Art was inducted in 1988 and received a standing ovation from his colleagues.

Art died three days before Christmas. The car was running, he had come into the house for something before a round of errands and collapsed. He was 87. At his funeral, his nephew Richard Heydinger spoke of the lectures he would receive about his lack of plant knowledge and as he helped in Art’s garden, how he would be reprimanded for things done not exactly right. He used the expression “curmudgeon” which, come to think of it, was one of the first words that sprang to my mind when I heard of his passing. If he was, he was a good-natured version of the term, always curious to know why, always fussing that things, whatever they were, should be better.

We profiled Art in the magazine in 1995 and as an afterthought, I asked him to write a short sidebar for our readers. Little did we realize it would be Art’s last writing. We have placed it here on our website if you would like to read it. It starts like this, advice that will forever ring true for gardeners:

“Glorious autumn days and their final profusion of flowers amid the backdrop of tinted foliage of trees and shrubs presage the end of another growing season and the inevitable fall tasks facing Chicagoland gardeners…”

Select here to read the full version of Art's story.