Book shows gardens grow despite pestilence of war.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

They are the most unlikely of images: new shoots of celery tended by a soldier in a World War I trench, rows of cabbage planted in a Jewish ghetto during World War II, corn growing high at a U.S. military compound in Iraq.

The sanity of small gardens, caught in stark black and white, belie the madness of war.

Years ago, University of Oregon landscape architecture professor Kenneth Helphand bought a small photograph of French soldiers tending a trench garden and the image worked on his mind until he found himself compelled to learn more.

Today, he'll introduce the result of more than two years of research on the subject - his new book, "Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime."

Helphand, who teaches courses in landscape history at the UO, said he has always been interested in the history of gardens and what they mean to people.

The picture Helphand first found in an antique store somewhere got him thinking about how people garden in extreme circumstances, in the same way that theologians and psychologists often study people in crisis.

But there was almost no previous research on the subject to pave the way for him. It's not a topic that comes up in standard military histories, he said.

His research took him to museums and libraries from London to Los Angeles, where he turned to personal diaries, letters and memoirs to learn about people and their gardens. He found himself both inspired by human resilience and depressed by the horrific conditions under which they labored to create, he said.

His book describes the trench gardens of World War I, the ghetto gardens of Nazi-occupied Europe, the gardens of the Japanese-American internment camps, and even gardens of U.S. troops currently in Iraq.

He interviewed soldiers and Jewish ghetto survivors such as Esther Mish- kin, who lived in the Kovno ghetto in Poland, and who remembered the garden her father built there.

"He used to just sit in it to watch things grow," Helphand recounted. "She said it gave him the feeling that something might survive." Her father didn't, Helphand said. Only his daughter made it out of the ghetto alive.

The research gave Helphand a profound understanding about what gardens mean to people under the worst circumstances.

"Gardens are about life," he said. "They're about home, making a new home or a reminder of where you came from. They're about hope. They're about work and very much about beauty even in these horrible circumstances."

A war-time garden that made a lasting impression on Helphand was one behind British lines in Belgium during World War I. It blossomed at a soldiers' club devised for rest and relaxation of both officers and enlisted men just a few miles from the front. And a sign beckoned men to "come into the garden and forget the war."

None of the war or ghetto gardens Helphand describes have survived, but he visited their locations anyway.

"I felt it was important to go to these places where they were," he said. "It was very much a quest."

BOOK LECTURE Kenneth Helphand: He'll talk about his new book, "Defiant Gardens," at 7:30 tonight at Lillis Hall, 955 E. 13th Ave., on the UO campus. A reception will follow. Available: The book is currently for sale at the University of Oregon Bookstore and Borders, and will be available by Friday at J. Michael's Books.