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Plants & Gardens News Volume 21, Number 3 | Fall 2006/Winter 2007
by Patricia Jonas
Defiant Gardens
Defiance is what makes gardeners.
—Henry Mitchell, Essential Earthman
One of the milestones of my gardening year is the day in July I spend judging entries in the "Greenest Block in Brooklyn" contest. This contest is more than a scheme to beautify a blighted urban landscape. It is a little about horticultural showmanship but more about the resourcefulness and grit of city gardeners as they struggle for victory over ugliness. It is above all about people taking control of their lives: employing gardens to transform buildings into homes and blocks into communities, and inspiring others to follow suit. Kenneth Helphand, author of Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, would call them defiant gardens. "Defiant gardens first astonish by their mere presence," Helphand writes, "and then they astonish when we recognize the sheer force of will and effort that created and sustained them. Such gardens are interrogative places, prodding us to ask questions," and leading us, like those green blocks and this book, to a new understanding of what garden-making means.
Helphand, a landscape architect and historian, reconstructs vanished wartime gardens through first-person accounts, testimonies, interviews with survivors, published memoirs, and photographs unearthed in little-known archives. In fact, he was spurred to write Defiant Gardens by his encounter with an astonishing photograph of French soldiers in World War I standing in front of a vegetable garden in the trenches. "This evocative picture haunted me for years… and became the germ of the idea" to examine gardens built in some of the most brutal and horrific landscapes of the 20th century—World War I trenches, ghettos in Nazi-controlled Europe, prisoner-of-war camps, and Japanese American internment camps. In such landscapes of violence, at the extremes of human experience, "the manifestation of the human ability to wield power over something is a potent reminder of our ability to withstand emotional despair and the forces of chaos." Helphand examines how life, home, work, hope, and beauty were experienced in the creation of all of these gardens. "These are commonplace themes, but the meaning of each is magnified by the context of war and the garden's defiant response to conditions."
The most unfamiliar story to me is that of the trench gardens—gardens that were dug on both sides of the Western Front, which comprised two snaking, continuous lines of trenches stretching 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. (In between the trenches was a no-man's land of obliterated forests, farms, and cities—"vast cruel desolations, which, until the curse fell on them, were rich and smiling countrysides," wrote one Englishman.) What is striking is the contrast between this "immense human creation that was a transformation of terrain at a continental scale" and the prosaic nature of the gardens. A German soldier wrote home asking for seed: "Please send me sweet-peas, convolvulus, sunflower, flax, mignonette, etc. I want to cover the unsightly earth with verdure." In such a hellish landscape, the gardens projected longing for home and tough, active hope. Helphand, quoting Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, writes: "Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope… To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable."
All of these gardens at the Western Front provided fresh produce for the troops and for prisoners. Most of the barracks in the Japanese internment camps during World War II had vegetable gardens too. "Gardens have deep meanings," Helphand writes, "but they are also about the simple and equally profound pleasure of a fresh cucumber." And the vegetables grown in gardens in ghettos and POW camps often meant the difference between starvation and survival: "Even a few beet leaves can keep one alive for an hour or two."
Before December 1941, over half of the Japanese Americans on the West Coast were making and maintaining gardens or were employed in agriculture or agriculture-related businesses. Within months of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the War Relocation Act had excluded them from the lush and fertile areas where they had lived, and forcibly relocated nearly 120,000 people—two thirds of whom were United States citizens—to remote areas in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, and California. Some carried with them seeds and cuttings, and almost immediately they began transforming the bleak and barren landscapes. Under armed guard, they went outside the barbed-wire enclosures to dig trees and shrubs to transplant in the camps. They set stones, also gathered from outside the camps. Wet spots became ponds and streams. They built rustic bridges, fences, and pavilions from whatever material they could scavenge. "All of these gardens," writes Helphand, "grand and small, were acts of resistance, directed toward the maintenance of cultural integrity and self-respect." Nearly 60 percent of the internees at Manzanar, near Lone Pine, California, were farmers or gardeners, and they created a beautiful adaptation of a Japanese stroll garden, which was often photographed, most famously by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote of that garden, "Sometimes in the evenings you could walk down the raked gravel paths. You could face away from the barracks, look past a tiny rapids toward the darkening mountains, and for a while, not be a prisoner at all." There were many great American gardens made in the ten camps, and one wonders whether Takeo Shiota, who designed Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, created a garden in the camp where he was interned until his death in December 1943.
The last chapter of Defiant Gardens examines contemporary gardens: community gardens, prison gardens, gardens in refugee camps, memorial gardens to victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, gardens in Iraq where American soldiers grow corn and lawns, and filmmaker Derek Jarman's garden, in which Helphand sees exemplified all of the garden themes of life, hope, home work, and beauty. Jarman's courageous and profoundly moving garden is on a bleak piece of English coast facing a nuclear power plant. He gardened there from the time he was diagnosed with HIV until he died of AIDS in 1994. "When we see an improbable garden, we experience a shock of recognition of the garden's form and elements, but also a renewed appreciation of the garden's transformative power to beautify, comfort, and convey meaning despite the incongruity of the surroundings. Gardens are defined by their context, and perhaps the further the context from our expectations, the deeper the meaning the garden holds for us."
The Joy of Gardening
Since its publication in 1998, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden, by Tracy DiSabato-Aust, has been among a handful of books that I put on every one of my lists of essential tools for gardeners. It should be for gardeners what Joy of Cooking is for cooks: Every new gardener gets a copy and learns from it over a lifetime. When there are so many superfluous, puffed-up books of gardening advice being published, it is reassuring to know that such a practical, hands-on book has flourished in the marketplace. Although there are today more than 130,000 copies in gardeners' hands, there are still millions of home gardeners (and alas, many professionals) unsure or misinformed about even basic garden maintenance practice. Timber Press has wisely published an expanded, redesigned edition—the first of what I hope will be many new editions and printings that will keep The Well-Tended Perennial Garden front and center in bookstores and garden centers.
The new edition is easier to read and printed on coated paper, which will certainly hold up better to water and soil (for those who bring it into the garden). It has 230 full-color photographs that are now throughout the text rather than in two 32-page signatures, and it is only $5.00 more than it was in 1998. Most of the additional photos are found in the "A to Z Encyclopedia of Perennials," which was not illustrated in the original. Except for the photos, there appear to be few changes in the encyclopedia: Begonia grandis has been added, and Ranunculus repens 'Pleniflorus' has been eliminated (would that it were as easy to eliminate this pest plant from gardens). There are more pages in the expanded edition, but most of the additional pages turn out to be a 32-page journal section. Even for people who write in their books, the value of this section will be limited except to gardeners who use the one-page-per-plant layout as a model for a separate journal. After all, who has only 32 perennials to maintain?
The text is basically unchanged, but one would hope that the future will bring not just expanded editions but new editions that include more plants in the encyclopedia and valuable new ideas from the author, who, like all of us, continues to grow as a gardener. In the meantime, if you don't have this book, buy it; and if your copy is falling apart, now is the time to get a new one.
Patricia Jonas is a horticulturist and writer, and director of library services at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a regular contributor to Plants & Gardens News.