While not as good as some of Capek’s fiction, The Gardener’s Year is a delightful read. The book is short but each chapter focuses on what home gardeners do during each month of the year.

As someone who enjoys gardening and knows people who really, really love gardening, I could see myself and others in his satirical, hyperbolic writing. Capek was a gardener himself and knew the mild insanity and obsessiveness of that particular breed of person.