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Book Review - “Gardening the Mediterranean Way”

February 02, 2011

News from the Library

We're fortunate to be featuring book reviews by horticultural history author Judith M. Taylor. After a career in neurology she retired to northern California and now "practices history without a license."  She is currently working on her forth book and is the honorary librarian and book editor for the San Francisco Garden Club. Her website is Horthistoria.

Gardening the Mediterranean Way coverHeidi Gildemeister is a founding member and former president of the Mediterranean Garden Society. This book is a sequel to her first one, Mediterranean Gardening: a Waterwise Approach. To show how serious she is about her subject she lives and gardens in Mallorca, a large island in the Mediterranean Sea. From time to time she comes up for air and travels to places like the Bay area.

Our own Richard G. Turner, editor of Pacific Horticulture, has written a foreword to this book, indicating how difficult it is to find hands-on direction in creating a Mediterranean garden. He has led the way with several impressive symposia at which Heidi Gildermeister was a key speaker.

The climate named for the Mediterranean basin but which is found in four other places, Chile, Cape of Good Hope, California and Southern Australia, consists in mild, wet winters with up to forty inches of rainfall each year and hot dry summers when rain is extremely rare.

The features which distinguish this climate include latitude between 30 and 40 degrees, both north and south of the Equator, and location on the west and south western coasts of continents, where the ocean currents offshore are usually quite cold. Archeology tells us that these regions did not always have this type of climate.

Fossil specimens show that vascular plants which we know nowadays need rainfall evenly dispersed throughout the whole year once flourished in those regions. The olive trees, quintessentially Mediterranean, is a living fossil. While it can survive miserably with no water at all, the tree must be given a little water throughout the summer in order to have a useful crop. Experts interpret this finding to mean that the olive tree dates from that earlier epoch.

Heidi Gildemeister supplies information about how to create your own Mediterranean garden, as well as ideas about siting the property and how to create an atmosphere in the garden. The largest part of her book is headed "Mediterranean Dream Gardens: choosing your own personal Eden". One might liken this to a series of twenty templates, each one with its own theme. The individual sections are succeeded by excellent lists of the plants which contribute to that ambience.

There is an "Evergreen Eden" in which shrubs and trees are prominent. A "Coastal Haven" deals with the boundary between sea and land. Terracing is the theme of "A Garden in the Hills". The "Swimming Pool Garden" is self-evident, as is the "Edible Garden". This is very good way of organizing a huge topic which could easily degenerate into lists and lists with more lists on top of those.

The author comments that for now almost all the plants in these categories tend to be from the Old World. She is not aware for example of a Chilean or Australian garden solely populated with Chilean or Australian plants of the Mediterranean type. That will come one day. Meanwhile here in California we can learn from her wisdom.

Copyright © February 2011 Judith M. Taylor

Gildemeister, Heidi. Gardening the Mediterranean Way. London: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004.

Find this book in the Arboretum Library catalog here.

 

 

Book Review - “Defiant Gardens”

January 26, 2011

News from the Library

We're fortunate to be featuring book reviews by horticultural history author Judith M. Taylor. After a career in neurology, she retired to northern California and now "practices history without a license."  She is currently working on her forth book and is the honorary librarian and book editor for the San Francisco Garden Club. Her website is Horthistoria.

Defiant Gardens coverKenneth Helphand, a noted landscape architect and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, Eugene, has come up with an amazing theme. He had seen a photograph of soldiers in the first world war standing next to a garden they had made at the front. The image stuck in his mind and led him to a series of researches culminating in this book.

Soldiers confined to the hellish trenches of the first world war, Jews confined to the even more hellish Polish ghettos in the second world war, Allied prisoners of war in Germany and Asia, and Japanese Nisei interned in the United States all made gardens which he has designated "defiant". Helphand even considers the substitute "gardens" made by American soldiers in the first Gulf War, covering the sand outside their tents with green tarpaulin.

This extraordinary book combines standard garden theory with striking quotations from primary sources which have survived. The illustrations are archival photographs taken by many different observers. Gardens have a lot of philosophical significance which Helphand elaborates on at some length.

As anyone who has ever attempted to do it knows, creating and maintaining a garden in normal circumstances needs a lot of resources. Once I had recovered from astonishment at the existence of gardens in these situations, my immediate thought was, where did they find seeds in the Warsaw ghetto. My next one was how did they find cameras and film to record their work. During the second world war in England we were very short of almost everything, especially photographic film, yet our deprivations were as nothing to those in Poland's ghettos.

Time is one of the first issues in creating a garden. One does not start to do it if the future is totally unpredictable. The residents of the ghettos had not conceived of the possibility that they were to be erased from the earth and they applied their usual systems of community organization to deal with being locked in the ghetto. Planting vegetable seeds in any available piece of ground would at least provide some food. Unlike the soldiers and prisoners of war, the Jews in the ghetto were completely on their own, abandoned by the entire world. Nothing came from the outside, yet the scraps and fragments of their diaries all say how much the sight of something green in the ground elevated their spirits.

Soldiers sent to fight in a war do not expect to be in a foreign land for years on end. Gardens made sense out of a chaotic world. Workingmen who had grown prize marrows and marigolds in allotments quickly got busy and re-constructed patches of "home". They were assisted in varying degrees by local farmers, family and friends and even in the end by the War Office in London.

The making of gardens was not limited to the Allies. The Germans also did it, some of them even more grandiose and complex than the English ones. British prisoners of war at Ruhleben founded their own horticultural society and affiliated it with the Royal Horticultural Society in London.

For a variety of reasons, Japanese immigrants to the United States had largely been confined to farming and landscaping. When they were forced into internment camps in 1944 they had the skill and experience needed to improve the dreadful conditions. After the war ended and they were allowed to return to their former homes, one of them, Yasusuke Kogita, dismantled the garden he had built at Minidoka and moved it back to Seattle so that it would never be forgotten.

While the topic of this book is very unusual, it is not unprecedented. In 1955 Enid Bagnold wrote a remarkable play, "The Chalk Garden", later to become a successful film, in which an enigmatic governess constructs a garden on unpromising chalk soil. Only at the end is it revealed that she learned this skill while in prison for murder.

Prison authorities in many countries use gardening as a form of rehabilitation. The doyenne of English gardeners, Rosemary Verey, led such a movement in England. Prisoners at Ledhill Prison entered their garden in the Chelsea Flower Show one year and won the top prize. The distinction between these formally sanctioned activities and the ones chronicled in this book is that the impulse sprang from within the victims themselves.

The soldiers, prisoners and internees suffered many losses before going home but the Jews in the ghettos were annihilated intentionally. Somehow their gardens seem the most poignant of all.

Copyright © January 2011 Judith M. Taylor

Helphand, Kenneth L. Defiant Gardens: making gardens in wartime. San Antonia, Texas Trinity University Press, 2006.

Find this book in the Arboretum Library catalog here.

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