During the civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Mr and Mrs Roami, a science professor and a nurse, sent their children away from Kabul to Europe for safety. Tragically, they lost the phone number of where the children had moved to and had no way of contacting them. The couple found solace in gardening. Despite the constant explosions of rockets and shells, they were unwilling to leave their home. They named flowers after their children, and tended and spoke to them. It gave them the hope that one day the family would be reunited.
At one point, battle raged on all four sides and it was too dangerous to cross the road to fetch water from the stream. The garden was starting to die. The couple decided to build a well, and after five hours of digging, they could pull enough water from the ground. ‘Neither the rockets nor the fighting could stop us. I think that is the true story of flowers and war, don’t you?’ said Mrs Roami. One might presume gardening and nature would be a luxury in wartime. Instead, as Lalage Snow shows in this extraordinary book, it is often an act of necessary psychological resistance.
Early on, while reporting on a military operation in Nad-e-Ali, a violent district in Helmand, Snow, an award-winning photojournalist and war correspondent, noticed that when the bombing and shelling ceased, she could hear the sound of birds and bumblebees. It was ‘utterly war’, but amidst it she finds gardens of beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, vines, roses and geraniums. Later, she’s told that ‘gardening is like breathing’ for Afghans.
Intrigued, Snow visits gardens and those who cultivate them in Kabul, Gaza, Ukraine, the West Bank, Helmand and the Israel Kibbutzim over a seven-year period to find out why people cultivate and tend flowers and plants — produce would be more obvious — in war and its aftermath.
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