"Take, for example, a little grass plant; if you want to sow the seed well and sparrows don't pick it up, it pricks through in a fortnight, and in six weeks it needs cutting, but it is not an English lawn yet. I know an excellent recipe for an English lawn - like the recipe for Worcester Sauce - it comes from an 'English country gentleman.' An American millionaire said to that gentleman: 'Sir, I will pay you anything you like if you will reveal to me by what method such a perfect, even, level, fresh, everlasting, in short, such an English lawn as yours is made.' - 'That's quite simple,' said the English squire. 'The soil must be well and deeply dug, it must be fertile and porous, not sour or sticky, not heavy or thin; then it must be well levelled so that it is like a table; after that you sow the seed and roll the ground well; then you water it daily, and when the grass has grown you mow it week after week; you collect the cut grass with sweepers and roll the lawn; you must water, sprinkle, wet, and spray it daily; and if you do this for three hundred years you will have as good a lawn as mine."
He goes on to say:
"We gardeners live somehow for the future; if roses are in flower, we think that next year they will flower better; and in some few years this little spruce will become a tree - if only those few years were behind me! I should like to see what these birches will be like in fifty years. The right, the best is in front of us. The right, the best is in front of us. Each successive year will add growth and beauty. Thank God that we shall be one year farther on!"
Karel Capek died in 1938, just after his beloved country of Czechoslovakia was sacrificed to the demands of Hitler's Germany. His brother Josef, the illustrator of this little book, died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the war.
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