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Product Description Why is it that in the midst of a war, one can still find gardens? In the most brutal environments, both stateside and on the battlefield, they continue to flourish. Wartime gardens are dramatic examples of what Kenneth I. Helphand calls defiant gardens” gardens created in extreme social, political, economic, or cultural conditions. Illustrated with archival photos, this remarkable book examines gardens of war in the 20th century, including gardens built behind the trenches in World War I, in the Warsaw and other ghettos during World War II, and in Japanese-American internment camps, as well as gardens created by soldiers at their bases and encampments during wars in the Persian Gulf, Vietnam, and Korea. Proving that gardens are far more than peaceful respites from the outside world, Defiant Gardens is a thought-provoking analysis of why people create natural spaces. From Booklist *Starred Review* Gardens that ignored the rules of nature and gardeners who challenged the laws of man are vitally united in Helphand's seminal and revelatory study of life during some of the most lethal conflicts of the twentieth century. From the torturous 475-mile trench line that formed the western front in World War I to the alien landscapes of the Japanese American internment camps in the U.S. during World War II, the sites of unfathomable human brutality also gave rise to acts of uplifting horticultural resistance. Whether they were subsistence vegetable beds improbably tilled beneath barbed wire fences in Nazi-created ghettos or symbolic topiaries artistically carved from brittle desert sagebrush, each audacious example bears solemn testimony to the assertive efforts of determined soldiers, POWs, Holocaust victims, and others to vanquish war's horrors through the spiritually ennobling act of gardening. Helphand's extensively researched history of gardens in wartime illuminates the grotesque juxtaposition of willful devastation and the astonishing tenacity required to create life in the face of death. Carol HaggasCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review “Kenneth Helphand, writes about war gardens―not just victory gardens, grown in time of scarcity, but those planted on hostile fronts, including Eastern Europe's ghettos and the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. Helphand calls the gardens an act of defiance.” ― NPR Morning Edition “Kenneth Helphand tells Jim Fleming how a photo of a French soldier tending a rose bush in a trench during World War I resulted in his book ‘Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.’” ― To the Best of Our Knowledge About the Author Kenneth Helphand is a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, where he has taught courses in landscape history, theory, and design since 1974. His other books include Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape, Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel, and Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space, coauthored with Cynthia Girling. Helphand served as editor of Landscape Journal from 1994 to 2002. He is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an honorary member of the Israel Association of Landscape Architects. He has received the Bradford Williams Medal and a Graham Foundation grant, as well as distinguished teaching awards from the University of Oregon and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.