Joseph Pla: A Young Writer’s Diary Amidst the Spanish Flu
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
March 8, 1897
Dearest reader,
On this day, Josep Pla (books by this author)was born, a Spanish journalist and beloved author whose literary career sprouted from a young man’s forced retreat during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
Though he began as a law student at the University of Barcelona, the epidemic closed his school and sent him home to the coastal town of Palafrugell (“Pala-frew-yay”), where he discovered that his roots belonged not in law books but in writing.
His seminal work, The Gray Notebook, was a diary he began in 1918, capturing not only the shadow of the Spanish flu but also the blossoming of a writer with keen eyes for the everyday and the extraordinary.
Pla once offered a charming, culinary metaphor that reveals his passion for the natural world and its beauty:
“Cooking is the landscape in a saucepan.”
A phrase that might inspire any gardener or gourmand.
In his diary, Pla reflects on the gentle rhythms of life displaced by pandemic chaos—an early moment of literary introspection as he traded legal texts for pages filled with light, landscape, and the lives around him. His observations are as attentive to the character of his village and family as to the broader sweep of cultural life in Catalonia.
Josep Pla’s journey reminds us that sometimes the most profound life changes spring from unexpected circumstances—and that even in the shadow of illness and isolation, the seeds of creativity can take root and flourish.
