Brian Dillon writes:

Gardens and battlefields are at once antithetical and oddly alike; among other (usually more pressing) things, they display our confusion about the opposition of nature to culture. Kenneth Helphand’s wide-ranging study of wartime gardens, and gardens in implausibly hostile peacetime settings, is in part about that confusion: about the ways in which specific conflicts and acts of cultivation are made to stand for greater elemental forces, both historical and natural. He writes about gardens on the Western Front; about gardens in the ghettoes and POW camps of Europe during the Second World War, and those made by the Japanese interned in the United States at the same time; about gardens in the interstices of postwar urban development and in the deserts of contemporary Iraq. Throughout, what is in question is a version of pastoral: that’s to say, not nature conceived as a simple refuge from history, but an ordered, serene nature, secluded from its wilder self.

(LRB 26 April 2007)

Trinity | hardback 303 pp. |ISBN: 9781595340214