Defiant Gardens – ‘Small pleasures must correct great tragedies’

In this December 1914 photograph, a British soldier of the London Rifle Brigade poses proudly behind his garden, festooned with stoneware rum jugs (on the extreme right). In the months to come, this location at Ploegsteert Wood in the Ypres Salient in Belgium would become the scene of horrific fighting. From the NPR website – from Imperial War Museum.

Kenneth Helphand published Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime in 2006.

“Kenneth Helphand, writes about war gardens — not just victory gardens, grown in time of scarcity, but those planted on hostile fronts, including Eastern Europe’s ghettos and the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. Helphand calls the gardens an act of defiance.”

• Gardens of World War I, built behind the lines of the Western front
• Gardens built in the Warsaw and other ghettos under the Nazis during World War II
• Gardens created in Europe and Asia by prisoners of war and civilian internees in both world wars
• Gardens constructed by Japanese American internees in U.S. internment camps during World War II

Helphand’s website continues the story with pages about Afghanistan, Ghetto Gardens, Guantanamo, Iraq, Japanese – American Gardens, POWs, and Prison Vietnam.

See Helphand’s Defiant Gardens web site here.

See NPR’s Defiant Gardens web page with photos and audio interviews here.

As a teenager, Roman Kent tended a garden with his brother in the Lotz Ghetto southwest of Warsaw. The Holocaust survivor speaks with Ketzel Levine about the garden.

Though not a professional gardener, Yasusuke Kogita loved stone. During his four years at the Minidoka Internment Camp, located in southern Idaho, he’d walk miles and miles into the surrounding sagebrush to find intriguing rock. He then engaged the help of his two young sons in getting sometimes massive boulders back to the camp, where he created an elaborate garden.