“Gardens promise beauty where there is none”
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
As we approach next Thursday when most of the nation will stuff itself with the bounty of a Thanksgiving feast, I wonder how many will actually be thankful in more than just rote rhetoric. I might be a little more thankful this year, because I will be celebrating 57 years of marriage to a woman who took her vow seriously when she said for "better or worse."
I am also thankful this year because of Kenneth Helphand, professor of Landscape Architecture, at the University of Oregon. That may sound strange and I assure you this column is not about landscape architecture. I accidentally found his book, "Defiant Gardens," while searching the library computer files for another book.
Had I not read Helphand’s book, I don’t think I would be as thankful for the feast day coming up. "Defiant Gardens," is about gardens created during wartime — not only the World War II victory gardens that are so much a part of America, but those gardens created on battlefields, in Prisoner of War camps, in the ghettos of wartime Europe and by the Japanese internees in this country who made the desert bloom with defiant gardens.
"The journey that set my feet on the path to write this book began with a photograph of French soldiers in World War I standing in front of a small vegetable garden adjacent to their dugout quarters," he wrote. That image haunted him and it became the germ of an idea that led to massive research for this book.
The research revealed how the human spirit is defiant even under extreme and sometimes inhuman conditions. "Gardens promise beauty where there is none," Helphand wrote, "hope over despair, optimism over pessimism and finally life in the face of death."
Indeed many of the gardens he writes about produce just enough sustenance to keep a person alive. His account of ghetto gardens in wartime Europe, the internment and prisoner of war camps in both European and Pacific theaters of war were often the difference between starving or surviving one more day.
Helphand wrote that to plant a garden one must be inherently optimistic. "The gardener has faith that what is planted will grow," he said. That obviously was the case in which Japanese-Americans who were interned by the United States during World War II in remote areas of the American west. They had to be inherently optimistic to plant a seed in the barren soil of the desert camps where they were confined.
In one camp, Helphand notes that 7,500 trees and 10,000 shrubs were planted to transform the desert into an Eden. Helphand wrote that sadly most of the trees and shrubs died after the war and the desert reclaimed the land, in the ruins of Manzanar where a gnarled cherry tree was found in full bloom.
In her diary Jean Gittens, who was imprisoned by the Japanese, noted that "not only was our diet improved by the added vitamins, but the joy of achievement more than compensated for the effort." Helphand’s book begins with trench gardens in World War I and continues through current wars in the Middle East and includes urban gardens in unlikely places. "Gardens mean many things," he wrote. "In times of crisis and difficulty, gardens have the potential to offer more than we have expected."
Near the end of the book, Helphand brings that message home when he describes a traffic island near his home in Eugene, Ore. where Thakorbhai Patel created a garden from seeds and cuttings he had carried from his native India. Helphand concludes, "Patel’s modest personal saga is enacted by millions of immigrants and refugees around the world as they endeavor to use gardens to re-create and remind them of home."
When you sit down to a Thanksgiving feast next Thursday give thanks for the indomitable spirit of mankind.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)