Cultural horticulture.(Book Review)

Karel Capek The Gardener's Year. The Claridge Press, 208 pages, 12.99m [pound sterling]

There are several categories of books on gardens and gardening: ancient texts such as Virgil's Georgics and Pliny the Younger's Letters describing his two villas, medieval and Renaissance herbals and treatises, seventeenth-century suites of engraved perspectives and parterre patterns, eighteenth-century works defining and debating competing theories of landscape aesthetics, nineteenth-century encyclopedias and periodicals, twentieth-century manuals and magazines, and--thanks to the invention of color photography--handsome coffee-table volumes depicting the gardens of the world.

There is another kind of book, more difficult to classify, that may contain a great deal of advice and opinions about gardens but which is fundamentally a work of literature about the act of gardening, in other words, a book by the gardener-writer. Sometimes this kind of author is a garden columnist for a newspaper or magazine whose omnium-gatherum is a series of small essays, usually arranged by month or season. Consider in this regard Vita Sackwille-West, whose columns for The Observer--which she wrote and subsequently published as In Your Garden a half-century ago, the first of a series of similar volumes--remain fresh and lively because they read like conversations with a gardening friend. Striking the wise-amateur-to-diligent-amateur note is important, which is why the second-person pronoun is so useful in this kind of writing. Vita's garden at Sissinghurst is the laboratory from which she dispenses advice to you, another eager gardener ready for the next experiment--say, that of making of a single-color garden, a white garden perhaps.

Katherine White, pouring over her garden catalogues as she readies for Spring in Maine and treating their authors with a respectful seriousness usually reserved for poets, wrote the New Yorker "reviews" that became Onward and Upward in the Garden, an enduring classic of singular charm. Hers is the voice one might employ, like Pliny, in letters to a likeminded friend one hopes will come for a visit. Eleanor Perenyi's 1981 Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden has a simplistic organizational scheme, alphabetical, that belies the author's lightly worn erudition and tart, opinionated, elegant prose style. This was the book that set the essayist Michael Pollan, author of Second Nature and The Botany of Desire, both gem-quality examples of the genre, on his course of editor-turned-garden writer.

Although a 2002 edition of the Czech writer Karel Capek's The Gardener's Year, first published in 1929, is included in the excellent Modern Library Gardening series that Pollan oversees, Claridge Press has brought out a 2003 edition with a new translation by Geoffrey Newsome. Capek (pronounced Chupek) was a Czech nationalist of growing international stature during the brief twenty-year span when his country existed as an independent nation free of Hapsburg control and before the Munich Pact destroyed its autonomy by delivering it to the Nazis. An important figure and voice in this exhilarating period--paralleled now by the cultural vitality of the post-Soviet Czech Republic--he wrote constantly, variously, and prodigiously in his several roles as journalist, playwright, novelist, essayist, and author of short stories and children's books. He also produced a fine travel book, Letters from England, which Newsome has also translated. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Capek should write on gardening, a personal avocation that he pursued with passion and knowledge.

Originally published as a regular column in the newspaper Lidove noviny, The Gardener's Year is a series of humorous vignettes flavored with real horticultural know-how, organized in traditional calendrical fashion. The forgivably sexist persona that Capek has ...