Book currents: growth industry.(two books)(Brief Article)

With the coming of spring, the Modern Library recently began a new series of classic books on gardening, literary excursions on the art and ethos of gardens, which the general editor of the series, Michael Pollan, likens to a conversation that "takes place over the back fence that joins any two gardens in the world." Perhaps the most delightful of the first crop is THE GARDENER'S YEAR, from 1929, written by the great Czech author and playwright Karel C apek and illustrated by his brother Josef. While C apek pays lip service to the well-established month-by-month almanac of garden tasks, his true subject is the stubborn monomaniacal nature of gardeners themselves. "Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation," he writes. "It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart." Real gardeners, it turns out, are oblivious to the pretty things that ordinary ...