Green Thoughts 
Brian Dillon
- Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth Helphand Buy this book
In 1944 and 1945, John Brinckerhoff Jackson surveyed the French and German countryside for the advancing US army. At the military intelligence training centre in Maryland, Jackson had been taught to see the territory he surveyed as an empty stage on which certain choreographed actions were to be performed, and others improvised in the event that the enemy, or the land itself, threw up surprises. The landscape, as far as possible, was to provide a backdrop for the movement of the principals. Crossing France and Germany, Jackson writes in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984), he began to feel like an 18th-century landscape gardener, corralling the natural world in the name of order and design. The landscape of war, he concludes, is not in principle very different from that of peacetime cultivation: they are both ‘intensified and vitalised by one overriding purpose which, of necessity, brings about a closer relationship between man and environment and between men’. 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.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Brian Dillon is the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room, and the UK editor of Cabinet. He is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriacal Lives.
Other articles by this contributor:
Onion-Pilfering · Michael Ondaatje
print layout
tell a friend