Defiant Gardening

"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 of both wars, tended to by prisoners and their captors; in internment camps for Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II; in garrisons, depots and battalion headquarters; in refugee camps; on the hollowed out concavities left behind by the Blitz. They are “short-lived, their marks on the land quickly obliterated.”

A plant nursery in the Glubokoye ghetto.

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.

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

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

Pictures and text lifted from Pruned (with more pics and ting)