I stumbled across Kenneth I. Helphand's Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (Trinity U. Press) at the library this week. It was shelved among the garden books, in plain site... like it was meant to be discovered. Funny, too, that it was published here in San Antonio.
Thanks to Google, I found the book's website, which offers excerpts such as this:
. . . This book, however, looks at those created in extreme situations—defiant gardens. Such gardens stand not in harmony with but in opposition to their locations, asserting their presence and almost demanding response from their human visitors. . . .My focus is on defiant gardens created during wartime. . . These gardens offer evidence of the profound meanings contained in the experience of gardens. These are all extreme situations, but there are lessons and ideas to be gleaned from these places that apply to garden making in more benign conditions....
Studying the intersection of gardens and war yields great rewards of understanding about humanity and about nature. Life, home, work, hope, and beauty are five attributes that lie dormant in all gardens, awaiting the catalyst that propels them to germinate and allowing us to recognize them as defiant gardens. These gardens can be of any scale, their life spans vary from that of a window box to a valley, and they may be real or imagined.
This seems intriguing, too--from the book jacket:
Proving that gardens are far more than peaceful respites from the outside world, Defiant Gardens is a thought-provoking anaylsis of why people build and work in gardens.... Informative and inspirational, this history of gardens during wartime documents how gardens have humanized landscapes and experience, even under the most dire conditions.
I'll let you know what I think of it when I'm finished.
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