Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, and: Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (review)

Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. Edited by Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-87071-047-8. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Pp. vii, 280. $29.95.

André Le Nôtre, gardener to King Louis XIV of France and arguably the greatest landscape architect of all time, is rumored to have said, "If you wish to see the face of God, make a beautiful garden." Something like that sentiment infuses Kenneth Helphand's beautifully written and finely wrought book, Defiant Gardens. At the very outset, the author tells us that "defiant gardens …represent adaptation to challenging circumstances, but they can also be viewed … as sites of assertion and affirmation" (p. 1). Gardens, he writes (p. 17), stand at the opposite pole to Samuel Hynes's celebrated definition of war as "unfamiliar, unimaginable, insane, appalling." They are "familiar, comprehensible, sane, and pleasing; the sensory richness and pleasures of the garden contrast with the sensory repulsiveness of war."

Gardens have given solace to some of the world's most stressed populations and we meet many of them in Helphand's pages: trenchbound soldiers on both sides in the First World War; confinees of the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and Kovno (today's Kaunas, in Lithuania); Allied and Axis POWs in the Second World War; and Nisei (Japanese-American) internees in the concentration camps in the American West during World War II. The chapters devoted to these heroic gardeners are graced by exceptionally well-chosen and evocative photographs and illustrations. My personal favorite (p. 2) shows "A bomb crater on the grounds of Westminster Cathedral in London [which] was left intact and used as a kitchen garden in 1942." How better to express the defiance of the British population in the throes of the Blitz? A second kind of defiance is displayed in a photograph (p. 98) of a scarecrow in the vegetable garden of the ghetto hospital in Lodz, Poland, "complete with yellow star."

The pages of Helphand's book abound with examples of the triumph of nature over the destructiveness of mankind at war, but we also encounter instances where even fecund nature is hard-pressed to overcome man-made physical devastation. Perhaps the best example of this is the battlefield of Verdun, the "still bleeding scar of the Great War." As late as 1986, a visiting journalist could write that the vista from Hill 304 was "as unearthly as anything I have seen as far as the eye can see, a heaving sea of mortified land" (p. 29). The book concludes, however, on a positive note, recalling the question posed by anti-fascist activists to their garden-tending brethren in the 1930s, "How can you plant roses when the forests are burning?," to which the answer was, of course, "How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning?" (p. 248).

There aren't many gardens in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally, where "raw nature," the globe's forests, plains, and wetlands, occupy center stage. Or gardeners, defiant or otherwise. "We have relatively little to say in this volume about the effect of war on humans," the editors warn (p. 7). Leaving humans out of the equation enables some of the contributors to this volume to employ a "counter-intuitive" approach that will give heart to readers who like to think of war as the handmaiden of progress. Thus, we learn that the massive increase in global timber production to meet the needs of World War II armed forces gave a considerable fillip to the postwar housing boom in Europe and North...