How to Spot a Real Gardener
By Karel Capek
Art by Josef Capek
I couldn’t resist sharing the tiniest bit from what, to this day, is my all-time favorite garden book, Karel Capek’s charming, humorous, warm, passionate, utterly irresistible 1927 classic, The Gardener’s Year:
I will tell you now how to recognize a real gardener. “You must come to see me,” he says; “I will show you my garden.” Then when you go just to please him, you will find him with his rump sticking up somewhere among the perennials. “I will come in a moment,” he shouts to you over his shoulder. “Just wait till I have planted this rose.” “Please don’t worry,” you say kindly to him. After a while he must have planted it; for he gets up, makes your hand dirty, and beaming with hospitality, he says: “Come and have a look; it’s a small garden, but—Wait a moment,” and he bends over a bed to weed some tiny grass. “Come along. I will show you Dianthus musalae; it will open your eyes. Great Scott, I forgot to loosen it here!” he says, and begins to poke in the soil. A quarter of an hour later he straightens up again. “Ah,” he says, “I wanted to show you that bell flower, Campanula Wilsonae. That is the best campanula which—Wait a moment, I must tie up this delphinium.” After he has tied it up he remembers: “Oh, I see, you have come to see that erodium. A moment,” he murmurs, “I must transplant this aster, it hasn’t enough room here.” After that you go away on tiptoe, leaving his behind sticking up among the perennials.
And when you meet him again he will say: “You must come to see me; I have one rose in flower, a pernetiana, you have not seen that before. Will you come? Do!”
To order The Gardener’s Year, click here.
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