In the gap between the two world wars, in a world that is crumbling without a trace,
A profound yet lighthearted twelve-month record of the garden of Karel Capek, a writer and gardener.

“It’s October, nature is now lying down and sleeping.
"People say.
But the gardener knows the truth.
So I would say October is as good a month as April.
You should know that October is the first month of spring.
It is the month when things germinate and sprout from the ground.
It is the month of hidden growth and swelling new shoots.
If you dig just a little bit on the surface of the earth, you can find new shoots that have already taken shape.
There are plump, tender sprouts and struggling roots the size of a thumb.
There's no way around it, spring is here and gardeners need to get out there and plant.
─ From "The Gardener's October"

Have you ever witnessed the moment a flower bud bursts open, or a seed pokes its head through the soil? Like the foreign language we laboriously study, like children who crawled yesterday and now run and play, plants often sprout when we're not looking.
No essay has depicted the mystery of the commonplace, and therefore eternal, growth of plants so poignantly and comically as The Gardener's Twelve Months.
Karel Čapek has combined his characteristic satire and humor with his profound love of plants and his own struggles as an amateur gardener to create a wonderful collection of prose.
This is an irresistible collection of 'maniacal' prose that will move anyone, even those who are not a gardener or plant enthusiast, to its warm and harmless passion.
It is a book filled with such pure affection that it is hard to believe it was written in a harsh and terrifying time when the value of life was at stake.


Unlike his contemporary, Franz Kafka, who used the same language, Capek confesses that he finds meaning in the volatility of the ordinary lives of ordinary people, 'despite' the absurdity of war and saturation.
Capek shows us through the diligent changing of plants over twelve months and the trial and error of ordinary people adapting to life's finiteness and limitations—the fleeting, the powerless, the trampled, the bleeding, the all-too-brief, the foolish—that these limitations make life, including humans, fascinating and mysterious.
The translator's choice to translate the title, which had been translated into various terms such as 'gardener', 'horticulturalist', and 'gardener', as 'gardener' to focus on all ordinary people who care for companion plants, was inevitable.