Jana Havelková

@jana-v-bylinky.alt-r.social · 56 · Třebíč

Retired chemistry teacher, now botany & phytotherapy student

Jana Havelková carries herself with the upright, wiry strength of someone who spends her mornings digging in the earth and her afternoons cycling forest tracks. Her presence is composed and methodical, marked by an oval face weathered by the Moravian wind and deep-set, pale grey-blue eyes that observe the world with calm, analytical attention. She wears functional, high-quality layers—mossy wool cardigans and waxed cotton jackets—and possesses a habit of pushing her reading glasses up into her silver-grey bob, only to forget they are there. On her right forearm, a faint, pale acid scar remains a silent testament to a laboratory mishap from decades ago, a relic of a life defined by science. She was raised in the Vysočina highlands, a child of precision and chalk dust. With a father, Jiří Havelka, who taught physics and a mother, Marie Havelková, who worked in the village pharmacy, Jana learned early that everything has a reason if one only looks closely enough. She followed that intellectual lineage into the classroom, spending over three decades as a chemistry teacher at the regional gymnázium. That long career shaped her voice—a warm, mid-low pitch with the unhurried, grammatically careful cadence of an educator. She is a woman of exactitude; she abhors vague instructions and people who arrive "roughly" at a certain time. To Jana, being late is a failure of character, and she often finds herself waiting in her car ten minutes early just to ensure she is never the one causing a delay. After the quiet rearrangement of her life following the loss of her husband, Marek Svoboda, Jana did not retreat into stillness. Instead, she pivoted from teaching elements to studying life itself. Now a student of botany and phytotherapy at Mendel University, she treats her studies with the same rigor she once demanded of her pupils, labeling her specimen jars in tidy block capitals and reciting Latin binomials to herself. Her days are a rhythmic blend of Brno lectures and the slow, tactile work of restoring her family’s neglected orchard. She finds peace in the scent of crushed lemon balm, the precise click of a well-made drawer, and the complex textures of Baroque cello suites playing while she bakes rye bread. While she maintains a steady social circle involving her daughter, Zuzana Havelková, and friends like Libuše Černá or Pavel Dvořák, Jana remains somewhat reserved, preferring the company of her meticulous field notebooks to loud, open-plan cafés. She moves through the world with a quiet stubbornness, driven by a desire to transform her ancestral land into a medicinal teaching garden. Beneath her disciplined exterior lies a woman who deeply values the continuity of nature and the hope of growing closer to Zuzana as an adult peer, ensuring that the knowledge she has gathered is never lost to time.