Planting Hope
Gardening in times of war.
BY JANE GARMEY
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK--For most of us the notion of gardening under difficult circumstances conjures up frost in May, an unexpected hurricane, or an incursion of hungry deer relentlessly pillaging a bed of perennials. Not so for Kenneth Helphand, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon. The chance flea-market purchase of a stereopticon depicting a scene of shelters in the French trenches flanked by gardens started him off on an astonishing search to find and document gardens created in times of war. His research has uncovered gardens made by soldiers in the trenches on both sides of the Western front during World War I; Jews imprisoned by Nazis in the ghettos during World War II; British soldiers in German POW camps during both World Wars; Japanese-Americans held at internment camps in the U.S. during World War II; residents of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995; and even small plots dug in the desert today by soldiers in Iraq.
I met Prof. Helphand when he was recently in Manhattan to give a lecture, sponsored by Wave Hill, about what he calls "the landscape" of war in our day. His digging into this previously unexamined subject has led him on a fascinating trail: from the Imperial War Museum in London to the World War I battlefields of Ypres and Verdun; from the Holocaust Museum in Washington to the former Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, Poland; and from the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to what remains of the internment camp at Manzanar in California.
In the course of his research, which relies primarily on first-person accounts--diaries, memoirs and testimonies--he has come into contact with an astonishing range of people. Among them, Roman Kent, who described the backbreaking work of removing stones in order to make a garden in the Lodz ghetto, a place where there were no gardening tools and where a watering can was "almost a luxury item," and Esther Mishkin, the only member of her family to escape from the destruction of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania in 1944. Ms. Mishkin remembered that watching his garden grow in the ghetto gave her father a feeling that because something was growing, he and his family could somehow survive.
This idea that a garden symbolizes survival even under the most extreme conditions is what most interests Prof. Helphand, and the photographs, drawings and archival material he has collected tell an astonishing story of endurance, courage and what might even be called an obdurate refusal to give in to the horror of the hell so close at hand. Yes, it can be argued that many of these gardens were created primarily to supplement subsistence rations, but what the evidence also shows is that many were intricate and fanciful creations containing as many flowers as vegetables. Again and again, they reveal the transformative power of a garden to provide not a refuge but certainly a respite from the incongruity and horror of the outside world.
From a meticulously laid-out 1942 kitchen garden constructed in a bomb crater on the grounds of Westminster Cathedral in the heart of London to a neat cottage garden planted around a makeshift tent in a Russian camp for refugees from Chechnya in 2004, these gardens take one's breath away. One of the most astonishing has to be that of the huge Ruhleben POW camp in Germany, which housed more than 7,000 British soldiers. Here, in 1916, 50 prisoners organized their own Horticultural Society, collected dues, and even became affiliated with the Royal Horticultural Society. They cleared a plot of 600 square yards, constructed cold frames, grew perennials and were later allowed by their captors to use the land inside a disused oval racetrack as a vegetable garden. Elaborate planting schemes were drawn to scale, and the prisoners even organized flower shows and lectures.
Gardens also had less benign uses: During World War II at the POW camp at Marlag near Bremen, Germany, prisoners digging three escape tunnels were able to dispose of the displaced soil unobtrusively by sprinkling it over garden paths and filling up a homemade compost site.
How and why one, in time of war and imprisonment, would create a garden that had little or no chance of long-term survival is a fascinating question. However, I suspect that those of us who garden instinctively know its answer. Stationed near Tikrit in 2004, Sgt. Carol Quam Jr., of the 141st Engineer Combat Battalion, decided to plant a garden and turned for help to Iraqi gardeners for what to grow in 100-140 degree weather. "That garden was a real release," he later recounted. "For a little while you could put your mind off what was going on around you."
In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela speaks of a garden he nurtured during his own years of captivity and is quite explicit about its meaning for him: "A garden was one of the few things in prison one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom."
In trenches, ghettos and camps, these "Defiant Gardens"--the title of Prof. Helphand's unforgettable book on the subject recently published by Trinity Press--were an attempt to create a kind of peace in the midst of madness and order in the prevailing chaos. When Europe was in the tightening grip of rising fascism, there was a saying among the members of CIAM, the international collaborative group of modernist architects: "How can one think about roses when the forests are burning?" The answer, of course, was itself a question: "How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning?"
Ms. Garmey writes on gardening for The Wall Street Journal.
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