KAREL ČAPEK AND THE GARDNER’S YEAR


Hans-Jørgen Wallin Weihe


In 1929 the Czech author Karel Čapek (1890 – 1938) published a book called  “The Gardner’s Year” in
Prague. At the time the author was 39 years old and famous for his play R.U.R, which had introduced
the word “robot” to the world. Čapek wrote about everyting. Himself he regarded two of his mania to
be “to understand” and “to express”. He was not occupied with expressing himself “but to express
things”. Čapek was a very emotial man and many claim that he died as a result of his nation’s death
when the München Pact the 30^th of September 1938 allowed Nazi Germany to occupy Sudentland. He
lived until Christmas the same year and was most likely killed as much of grief and depression as
by inflamation of his lungs. His brother died a few yars later in one of the death camps of Nazi
Germany. He had made the illustrations to his brother’s book of gardening.


The Nazi occupation of his country banned all Karel’s works. Thus the Karel most likely have
published the only gardening book ever to be banned by a poltical censurship. In order to
understand the political aspects of his writing and his elegant and great variation in writing I
have found it most helpful to read other works such as “Apocryphal Tales”, which is a collection of
newspaper artcles from Lidové noviny his principal newspaper.


Čapek’s book on gardening is one of a mountain of books about gardening, but most likely the only
one of them devoted to the psychology of gardeners. Even if most students of Čapek most likely
regard the book to be a minor work the author himself thought of life as a subset of gardening.

The Gardner’s Year can be read as a metaphor of life and the contemporary political situation of
Europe and particularly of Nazi Germany. The comedy of the petty tyrant, the man or woman, who
picks up his garden tools one morning, falls in love with gardening, and then assumes that the
world and particularly the weather will organize itself in harmony with his new obsession. His
prayers are carefully phrased words for all occasions. Nothing is left to God’s decisions; “that
there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant-lice and snails, no mildew and
that once in the week thin liquid manure and guano my fall from heaven. Amen.”


For Čapek to understand what gardening means is to understand the complexity of human nature. “If
we should say that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and
distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best things of all is to be a living man – that is a man
who grows”. Michael Pollan, one of the most famous garden writers of USA, claim that Čapek will
engage gardeners centuries ahead because he was able to communicate the power of plants to change
us in mind and body, the gratuitous beauty of a flower, the moral lesson of a pest, the ancient
language of landscape design, and the endlessly engrossing ways cultivating a garden attaches a
body to the earth.


The gardeners described by Čapek are only rarely as good as they would like us to think that they
are. Their body parts get in the way and their bottoms stick high up of the vegetable patch, they
step on their cucombers and strawberries, their spring begins in October and their fall in March
with the fading of the first snowdrops. They have immodest and inexhaustible desires just by
thinking about dirt and they are easily seduced by garden catalogues that lists the ingridients in
a good garden soil such as dung, manure, guano, leafmold, sods, humus, , sand, straw, lime, kainit
and beautiful flowering plants, seed for all desires and all kind of technical gadgets used in
gardens.


The question of garden soil is a moral one for Čapek. Some soils are beautiful in richnessand
consistency while others are as ugly as the coldness, callousness and malice of human souls. The
last phrase is a grim assesment of humanity and the fate of Europe in the war years to come and
perhaps even of the future facing us today.



Literature




Čapek Karel (1997) Apocryphal Tales, North Haven CT: Catbird Press


Čapek Karel (2002) The Gardner’s Year, New York: The Modern Library


Čapek Karel (1931) The Gardner’s Year, London: George Allen & Unwin LTD