In refugee camps as well as lockdown, gardening helps pass time in limbo
21.08.2023 - 11:47
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
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by Yasmine Shamma, University of Reading
During lockdown, my family’s cul-de-sac became our universe. Suddenly, our neighbours became the only people we’d be guaranteed to see in the flesh for the foreseeable future, and the “good fences” that are known to rigidly force “good neighbours” came down, replaced by authentic forms of humanity and connection.
One such form of connection was in gardening. It proved an easy topic to cultivate, and return to, over the weeks that piled on top of one another. Tim, a neighbour whose name we hadn’t known until lockdown, offered our toddler daughter a (distanced) fistful of fuchsia flowers after she’d pointed to them and called them pretty. Over the following weeks, an exchange of courgette plants and Sweet Williams proceeded, and we now have both a friend, and a colourful garden.
I wonder what will happen to this garden. Gardens simultaneously planted throughout the world’s backyards, balconies, and urban walls – will they, like other momentary obsessions responding to news cycles, be abandoned? And what about the birds, globally united in their sudden singing? What will happen to the lettuce on my windowsill, the tomatoes on the balcony, and the Sweet Williams in the garden, now that the world is waking up and turning the office lights back on? We can only focus on one thing at a time.
The gardens we so furtively grew, and might furtively abandon, remind me of other gardens planted in periods of waiting. For the last few years, I have been interviewing Syrian refugees about their experiences of displacement. One of the things that has struck me the most is the common tendency to garden.
At Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, where I have conducted much of my research, small bushes of