The Gardener's Year is a charming and light-hearted insight into the life of an amateur gardener. Structured loosely around what to plant, grow or cultivate each month, Karel Capek takes us on a rollicking journey through a year in his own small garden.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features lively black and white illustrations by Czech artist Josef Capek and is translated by M. and R. Weatherall.
From making puddles with an untamable hose to sowing luxuriant weeds instead of grass, Capek reveals how a gardener grows into his surroundings 'spurred on by each new failure'. Subverting the tradition of a 'how to' gardening book, he teaches his readers about the magic of seeds, the perils of planting vegetables and the thrilling surprises of a rock garden. As the year progresses and frail buds turn from flowering stems to drooping bulbs and falling leaves, Capek's small garden buzzes with life, wisdom and humour.In Green Shades: An Anthology of Plants, Gardens and Gardeners, acclaimed author Elizabeth Jane Howard brings together a fascinating selection of gardening writing that spans the centuries, the seasons and the species.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, pocket sized classics with ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.
The contents are delightfully eclectic and wide-ranging - she pays homage to the great English landscape artists of the eighteenth century and to great women gardeners such as Vita Sackville-West. There's advice from Pliny on how walnuts can be used to dye hair, and Joseph Addison encourages blackbirds to gorge on his cherry trees. Linking the numerous extracts is Elizabeth Jane Howard's perceptive and highly personal commentary, which skilfully guides the reader from one subject to the next.
The late Elizabeth Jane Howard was the author of fifteen highly acclaimed novels. The Cazalet Chronicles - The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change - have become established as modern classics and have been adapted for a major BBC television series and for BBC Radio 4. In 2002 Macmillan published Elizabeth Jane Howard's autobiography, Slipstream. In that same year she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. She died, aged ninety, at home in Suffolk on 2 January 2014.
Karel Capek was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia. He was interested in visual art as a teenager and studied philosophy and aesthetics in Prague. During WW1 he was exempt from military service because of spinal problems and became a journalist. He campaigned against the rise of communism and in the 1930s his writing became increasingly anti-fascist. He started writing fiction with his brother Josef, a successful painter, and went on to publish science fiction novels, for which he is best known, as well as detective stories, plays and a singular book on gardening, The Gardener's Year. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times and the Czech PEN Club created a literary award in his name. He died of pneumonia in 1938.
MacMillan Collector's Library
Pub Date: April 25, 2023
0.8" H x 5.6" L x 3.7" W
224 pages
hardcover