How a Gardener Is Made

Karel Čapek (1890–1938) was a Czech writer, journalist, and passionate gardener, whose book The Gardener's Year (1929) is still read today by generations of those who have gotten their hands dirty in their own flower beds. With gentle humor and an eye for detail, he describes how an ordinary man gradually becomes an obsessive grower — an obsession that anyone who has once succumbed to it will recognize. The excerpt below was translated especially for Beckon and is accompanied by photographs from our own garden.

Contrary to all appearances, a gardener is not born from a seed, a shoot, a bulb, a tuber, or a cutting, but is made by experience, by his surroundings, and by the conditions of nature.

When I was a boy, my attitude toward my father’s garden was rebellious, even malicious, because I was forbidden to tread on the beds and to pick unripe fruit.

Adam, likewise, was forbidden in the Garden of Paradise to tread on the flower beds and to pick the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, because it was not yet ripe; only Adam—like us children—picked the unripe fruit anyway, and was expelled from Paradise as a result. Since then, and for all time, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has remained unripe.

When a man is in the flower of his youth, he thinks that a flower is something worn in a buttonhole or given to a girl; he has little understanding of the fact that a flower is something that survives the winter, something that must be hoed and manured and watered and transplanted and propagated and pruned and tied up and rid of weeds and spent blooms and dry leaves and aphids and mildew.

Instead of turning over the beds, he runs after girls, pursues his ambitions, enjoys the fruits of life that he himself has not grown, and behaves, on the whole, rather destructively.

A certain maturity is required, I should say, a certain age of fatherhood, before a man can become an amateur gardener. Besides, he must have a garden of his own. Usually he has a professional gardener make one for him, imagining that after work he will come and look at it, take pleasure in the flowers, and listen to the birds chirping.

Then one day it happens that he plants a little flower with his own hands.

It happened to me with a houseleek. In the process, a little soil somehow finds its way into his body through a hangnail or some such thing, causing an infection or inflammation; in short, the man becomes an inflamed, that is to say, an ardent gardener.

A claw gets caught, and the whole bird is trapped.

Photo: Vladimír Jenčurák