The concept behind Defiant Gardens isn’t activist per se, but it is indicative of the subversive mentality that activist designers and artists espouse. Perhaps, then, we can see their cultivators and curators as resistance leaders in their own right.
Kenneth Helphand, who wrote Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, defines these spaces as:
gardens created in extreme or difficult environmental, social, political, economic, or cultural conditions. These gardens represent adaptation to challenging circumstances, but they can also be viewed from other dimensions as sites of assertion and affirmation.
Helphand’s book focuses on gardens built by humans in the face of great adversity, ranging from gardens behind the lines of the Western front during WWI, to gardens constructed by Japanese American internees in U.S. internment camps during World War II. The psychology of these spaces epitomizes resistance, as evidenced by the following excerpt from Helphand’s book:
Polish architect Jersey Soltan, a member of CIAM, reports that the organization had a saying in the 1930s, when Europe was in the grip of rising fascism: “How can one think about roses when the forests are burning?” The group of course had an answer to its own question: “How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning?” Gardens always ask us this most elementary question. For the forests are always burning, and we always both need and want to plant roses.
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