Source: Imperial War Museum
Officer Brook Turner tends to his lawn in a US army camp near Baghdad, 2004
Photo: Neil Sperry
All credit to everyone else for this post. I've had to do very little but re-present it, which I normally hate doing, but this deserves it. Really fantastic stuff.Photo: Neil Sperry
Thanks to Scott Webel at the Museum of Ephemerata for his email way back in the summer after he looked at my Tanks & Tablecloths site and suggested that I might be interested in Alexander Trevi's post on Pruned, I discovered something called defiant gardening. The Pruned text will also lead you to Ketzel Levine's article for NPR and where it all began - with Kenneth Helphand's book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.
It's a lovely concept - albeit associated with the grizzly horrors of war. Helphand's book demonstrates that both soldiers and civilians caught in the chaos and destruction of war will - in what could be viewed as an act of defiance - struggle to create natural spaces, in which they can tend vegetable gardens but also nurture a need to exert some control over a situation that is often way out of control.
Photo: Simon Norfolk
1990-91, during the Gulf War a green tarp forms a lawn, pinned down with sand-bags.
Photo: Don Smith
1990-91, during the Gulf War a green tarp forms a lawn, pinned down with sand-bags.
Photo: Don Smith