Defiant Gardens

(Army Warrant Officer Brook Turner trims his lawn with scissors in a camp north of Baghdad, Iraq.)

Defiant gardens are gardens created during times of extreme crisis, built behind the trenches of World War I, on both sides of the Western Front; in Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps during World War II; in POW and civilian internment camps, tended to by prisoners and their captors alike; in internment camps for Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II; in garrisons, depots and battalion headquarters; in refugee camps; even on the hollowed out concavities left behind by the Blitz. They are “short-lived, their marks on the land quickly obliterated.”

And to learn more about them, either read this report from NPR or purchase Kenneth Helphand's engrossing book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.


(A bomb crater in 1942 London becomes host to a kitchen garden. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)


(A soldier poses in his trench garden at Ploegsteert Wood in the Ypres Salient, the scene of many horrific battles. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)


(Photo by Simon Norfolk, taken from David Rieff's article, “Displaced Places,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 September 2003. At a camp in Ingushetia, Russia housing thousands of refugees from Chechnya, Mailia Huseeinova “built a makeshift garden with white stones and two summers ago she planted sunflowers that grew to drape over the roof of the tent. She says that though others in the camp think she's odd for doing so, she likes to surround herself with beautiful things.”)


(A Taoist and Buddhist inspired stone garden in an internment camp in Manzanar, California for Japanese Americans during World War II. Photo by Kenneth Helphand.)


(Helphand writes, “In the 1990-91 Gulf War, a green tarp held down by sandbags is transformed into 'lawns,' with a sign warning 'stay off.' The tent city that comprised this U.S. Air Force Base at Al Khary, Saudi Arabia, was completely dismantled after only five months.” Photo by Don Smith.)

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