From Gaza to Ukraine: capturing the power of gardening in war zones

'What I tried to do with War Gardens is ignite a sense of empathy and make readers realise that someone from Gaza or in Afghanistan is just like us,' says British photographer and author Lalage Snow

Isra Ahmed’s soiless garden, Gaza, 2013: "With the help of an international organisation, I grow vegetables on the roof of our home. It is only a young garden [but] people with a high roof sometimes see this garden and try to copy it. Fish waste provides the nutrients for the plants, but the water is often very saline. We might not have land, but at least we can farm. I love to come up here with my books and study. Green is a calm colour. During the war, I was scared for my siblings; they were too innocent to witness what they did. People died in front of our very eyes. War destroys our dreams more than anything else, and our lives here in Gaza are beyond our control." Photo: Lalage Snow

Igor Norenko, Donetsk, 2014: "I made different levels of the garden for different types of plants and find it’s more economical for watering. About 80 per cent of it is for the family to eat - the only things I don’t grow are potatoes and onions. The plant where I work is closed while this war carries on, so I’ve got more time to garden. The war is a real mess, [but] both sides have made mistakes. I never thought I’d see war in my lifetime. The city is almost empty now - even my family left when the shelling started. My wife begged me to go, but I couldn’t leave this house or this garden. I’ve lived here all my life; this is my garden and this is my home." Photo: Lalage Snow

Naif Dubaidi Jabalyia, Gaza: "Life is beautiful, but we don’t know how to use it. I used to work as a gardener in Israel, but the border closed when Hamas came to power, so I opened a local shop. My garden used to be so, so beautiful; the trees and flowers were 35 years old, and the ground was green with grass. It was a magical place. It was destroyed in the war in 2009. We heard the shells land. Thud, thud, thud. I rebuilt, but what you see is nothing to what was here before. There is so much poverty, so little laughter and so much suffering here, but there's no suffering in my garden. I dream that one day I will have a huge garden with animals and a lake. Paradise." Photo: Lalage Snow

A boy picks flowers in the ruins of Simonovka. Photo: Lalage Snow

Mohammad Abu Habsa, Kalandia Refugee Camp, West Bank, April 2016: "The garden used to be my strength. I live in this camp, but my heart and soul still belong to my village, my land on the other side of Jerusalem, to the tree under which I was born. Why should I be a refugee in my own country? What would you do if I tried to take your shoes or your blouse? You’d fight me off, wouldn’t you? I’ve seen the inside of every cell of every prison in the country. Since the death of my son, I’ve let my garden go. He is dead, [the army] will demolish my house … my garden will be destroyed; there’s no reason to bother with it at all." Photo: Lalage Snow

Alexi, Donetsk, 2014: "This was my grandmother’s house, but it is mine now. I used to play here in the green buggy when I was three, but now am preparing the house for when I get married. I’m an engineer in a local factory, but it is closed now so I’m working in the house and on the garden. I hear the shelling coming closer; last night I slept in a corner, but I’m preparing the shelter for tonight with blankets and food. I don’t want war and don’t care how this started, but Ukrainian fighting Ukrainian is madness. I don’t want to live in a country where we are killing each other, but this is my home and these are my memories, so where else am i expected to go?" Photo: Lalage Snow

Alexandra Nagaradnuk, Simonovska, 2014: "When the shelling started, I mostly lived in the cellar for about a month, and survived off eggs from my hens and strawberries from my garden, which I also sold and bought bread. I thought I would die in that basement. I used to speak to God, and pray for him to help me. I left for a safer village and came back when the Ukrainian army came back. This time last year I was preserving vegetables for the winter, now look; there are mines and unexploded ordnance in my garden. I never thought war would come here. Whenever I hear a plane, I get frightened and sometimes it’s just my imagination and there are no planes. I’m still frightened. But I have to rebuild my house and garden." Photo: Lalage Snow

Ramesh, Kabul, 2015: "My father was head of an agricultural bank and the family were well-off. We had a huge house with an enormous garden. My father loved flowers and gardening, and I learnt his passion, helping him to weed and water after school. When he died, the security situation worsened, and my brother, who was working in the ministry of finance, left the country. I stayed and, after the fall of the Taliban, found a job as a gardener for a cultural organisation, where I worked until six years ago. As soon as I lost my job, I built this garden. I wanted to build one where we used to live but, well, it is just a road now. My father-in-law owns this land, but I built everything you see here.” Photo: Lalage Snow

Zleikha Muhtaseb Hebron, West Bank, 2016. " Wherever I go, I garden – gardening is life, it’s good for the heart, the soul, the spirit, it’s meditation and inspiration, and the faith it instils in my heart gives me strength. This was a safe, open place 30 years ago, but things started to change when they built the first settlement. Their presence brought troubles. We have cages on our balconies for protection; they used to climb up our walls into our homes or throw rocks at us. With the cages they can’t hit us and it’s safe to grow my plants. Carnations are my favourite, they are like royalty, don’t you think? But I also love violets; they are sweet and fragile and you feel special when they flower." Photo: Lalage Snow

Hani Amir Mas’ha, West Bank, 2016: "My house and garden are surrounded by the wall they built in 2003. They uprooted my trees with bulldozers and, honestly, it felt like they were uprooting me. They destroyed the nursery where I grew plants to sell. Settlers and soldiers often come in the dead of night and threaten us, throw stones and trample all over my land. Diplomats stepped in so the situation is a little bit better now, but you never know. They want this land, but this land is mine. I’m not angry about their hatred towards us, their cruelty or violence. But I am angry that they have treated nature so badly. I don’t know if I’m right in staying here, but I do know that this garden belongs to me." Photo: Lalage Snow

Khaka Khalil, Kabul, Afghanistan, 2017: "The house was built for King Amanullah Khan’s secretary in the 1920s. My father was the tailor to the royal family, and moved us there when I was a boy. There was a building on that side, but we demolished it to make the garden bigger. We had apples, cherries, pears and pomegranates, but we never picked them. My father used to tell us to leave the fruits there to make the house more beautiful. During the civil war, we moved away. Everything died; it was heart-breaking. When the Taliban left, we could start gardening again. The situation is not good in Kabul now: security, unemployment, you know. And the city is so noisy and polluted, but flowers freshen your mind and bring you peace." Photo: Lalage Snow

Fayez Taneeb, West Bank, 2016. "We’re surrounded on three sides by the wall and factories. This is my ancestral land, but in 2002, they took 60 per cent of what I own. No one can understand the relationship between me, my land and my trees that they uprooted. They’re killing themselves, really, as this is one of the purest water springs and they’re polluting it. I’ve been arrested, beaten, buried, had the farm deemed a military zone... you name it. After years, they gave up, and let us plant. The only thing I need Israel for are bees to pollinate my crops. Everything else comes from the ground. God created us from the soil and we bury our dead in the soil. You can’t get more of a stronger link between man and land." Photo: Lalage Snow

Bardia Khilani, Gaza, 2013: "My garden takes a lot of looking after, especially since the phosphorus, but how else can we survive? I try not to stay inside in the darkness unless there is danger. It is very gloomy and makes me worry about my children. We’re in a state of relative calm at the moment, but war casts a long shadow. In the last conflict, one of my daughters was wounded by shell shrapnel. In the previous one, another lost all her hair from fright, and a third developed severe psychological problems. My youngest son still has screaming nightmares. From the moment they are at school or out of the house I’m scared for my children. At least if I’m out in the garden all the time, I can watch for them." Photo: Lalage Snow

Gulha Hazrat, FOB Lashkar Gah, Helmand, October 2013: "I’ve worked on this military base for some years now. I live in Lashkar Gah city and have always been a gardener. Why do I garden? Everyone needs green space and flowers in their life. Don’t you? And we have the best gardens in the world. The foreign soldiers based here, when they are tired or want to speak with their friends, they come here to relax after their work, and it makes me happy to see them chatting. I think they are from different countries so sometimes when the foreign soldiers [come], I will be in danger. The Taliban will probably cut my head off for working here. I don’t think my garden will survive either." Photo: Lalage Snow

Huda, Gaza: "The area was hit by phosphorus and this is the first year since the war two years ago that the trees and plants have started to produce. We couldn’t care for the plants properly and we lost a lot of them. Even the livestock starved to death. There was no water, and animal food is expensive, you know. I feed the three generations of my family with fresh produce, and I can also preserve and pickle the surplus as well as making olive oil." Photo: Lalage Snow

South African architect Jolyon Leslie in his garden in Kabul, where he's lived since 1989: "Most of the Taliban came from rural areas and were complete softies when it came to flowers. I remember waiting for a flight from Kabul when they were in power. They had their own private garden at the airport and were far more interested in polishing the rose leaves than checking I had the right papers to be there and travel around. There is something very special about the climate here. Things just grow." Photo: Lalage Snow

Ibrahim Jerada, The British Cemetery, Gaza: I keep this as the best place in Gaza, the cleanest; it’s my responsibility. I make sure the plants at each grave are happy and well-tended, and that the olive trees give shade where needed. In 2009, 350 graves were destroyed, but we’ve restored the order and peace. War is war – no place is safe. In our country, it is a duty to care for both the living and the dead – there are no borders here, so there are Jews, Muslim and Christian graves. All that matters is that the soul is in Paradise. Here in Gaza, it’s a miserable situation. But whatever you can imagine in your head as the best place in the world... it’s Paradise. it’s here, in this cemetery. Photo: Lalage Snow

When Lalage Snow first arrived in Afghanistan's Helmand Province in 2010, then in the grips of a vicious battle between the Taliban and UK troops, the British war photographer stumbled across a story far removed from the carnage. Not that she knew it at the time, however. Her first meeting with the Afghan army base captain, General Shirin Shah, was supposed to be merely introductory, but the veteran soldier had other plans.

“You British love your gardens and so do we,” he exclaimed via a translator, before leading Snow to the back of the barracks and into a small outdoor nursery. She found a tight patch of soil which was home to a dazzling display of flora, with red geraniums and orange dahlias intermingling with scarlet and yellow roses.

Snow retells this tale in her affecting book, War Gardens: A Journey through Conflict in Search of Calm. In unhurried yet clear-eyed prose, she recalls how that meeting sowed the seeds for a project she would take on two years later – one that took her to other conflict zones, such as Palestine's West Bank and the Ukrainian city of Donetsk – in order to "understand just how vital gardens are against a horrid wilderness of war".

However, before the idea for a book began to take shape, Snow recalls how taking photographs of Afghan gardens – from the small and patchy to the more meticulous – gave her stint in the country a new sense of meaning. "As a war correspondent you can really begin to feel desensitised to your surroundings," she says.

"There were a lot of us photographers around in ­Afghanistan, and you take these images of maimed soldiers and starving children, and you begin to wonder what does it all mean any more? Because if the situation is not changing, something is ultimately failing. So I began to work in a counterintuitive way. Since Afghans are mad-keen gardeners, I began chatting to them about that."

A new take on an old story

That quest to seek a fresh perspective on a tired story was effective in breaking the ice – and then bread – with locals suspicious of foreign media. Tired of constant discussions of war, some Afghans were more interested in chatting about roses than rockets, Snow found.

"I was completely surprised by their enthusiasm," she says. "Before, when I approached them for interviews they would say: 'Why should I talk to you? You come here all the time and nothing changes for us. You can go back home, but we must stay here.' But when I said: 'I actually just want to talk about your plants,' they would say: 'Oh, let's do that.'"

There is a line in the Quran from the Prophet Mohammed. He says: 'If you want to see me, give a rose to your neighbour as a gift.

Of course, gardening is a practice steeped in metaphor, and reflections on war were never far from the surface. It was an insight Snow gleaned on a rooftop in Gaza in May 2013. "I met this Palestinian who kept 500 plants, all kinds of cactus, on his roof," Snow says. "He used the cactus as a metaphor for the Palestinian struggle, in that you can pluck it and put it in rather dry soil and it will flourish. Interestingly, the Israelis also told me the exact same thing. It made me want to shake both of these people and say: 'See? You at least have that commonality.'"

A year later, in 2014, Mulla Issa from the Shin Kalay village Helmand, told Snow: “There is a line in the Quran from the Prophet Mohammed. He says: ‘If you want to see me, give a rose to your neighbour as a gift.’”

Meanwhile in Ukraine's industrial city of Donetsk, which Snow visited when it was seized by pro-Russian separatist forces in 2014, she discovered that gardening was viewed as the cultural fault line separating them from the country's developed cities. In a telling passage, Snow meets a seasoned green thumb, Alexander, who watered his 30-plus balcony plants every day despite the shelling around him. "It is important to make our children love gardens; it teaches them old-fashioned values to enable them to be good Ukrainians in the future," he told Snow. 

Igor Norenko from the Leninsky District, told her that same year: “I made different levels of the garden for different types of plants, and find it’s more economical for watering. About 80 per cent of it is for the family to eat – the only things I don’t grow are potatoes and onions. The plant where I work is closed while this war carries on, so I’ve got more time to garden.”

Snow says the disparity of living conditions in Donetsk and Ukraine's unoccupied cities, some of which were merely an hour or two away, shocked her. "Because of the war, a lot of supermarkets and shops closed, and imports were drying up," she recalls. "So people there returned to subsistence gardening. People grew their own fruit and vegetables. And Ukrainians have a deep connection to the land, anyway, which goes back to before the fall of communism. So what was happening there was they were returning to the old ways and they were using that as a source of pride in the culture. They felt like they were true Ukrainians."

A sense of empathy

It’s these kinds of insights and anecdotes that make Snow’s book appealing to everyone from news hounds and lovers of travel literature to gardeners. It also resulted in Snow promoting her book at various events, from the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai and literary festivals across Europe and Asia to small gardening centres in the UK. 

It is in the latter, says Snow, that she is truly seeing the effect of her work. "There were people who read the book who only know about the countries based on what they hear in the news, and they don't know anything about the people," she says. "By reading about them, it challenges some of these ideas they have. What I tried to do with War Gardens is ignite a sense of empathy and make readers realise that someone from Gaza or in Afghanistan is just like us."

What I tried to do with War Gardens is ignite a sense of empathy and make readers realise that someone from Gaza or in Afghanistan is just like us.

The book also illustrates how gardening habits can form part of a country or a city’s character. Kabul and Dubai may seem worlds apart, for instance, but Snow immediately saw a connection within the soil, so to speak. She points to how both cities sustain their gardens through flood irrigation, an ancient method of growing where water is funnelled in small trenches, which seep into the crops. “This is why Afghanistan is surprisingly green, and they have all these wonderful flowers like geraniums,” she says. “That kind of irrigation I see here in Dubai as well. It is not about watering certain parts, everything gets a spray here.”

As for the book's effect on Snow's gardening skills, she says it is a case of a work in progress. With her mother and brother being owners of proud gardens, Snow admits the family's green pedigree has not filtered down to her. "I will try to grow a grapefruit this year, though," she quips.

Instead, if there is one universal takeaway from her adventures, it’s the deep ­feeling of calmness that gardens can provide. “I was in Lahore for a book event not long ago and I was jet-lagged and tired, and by accident I discovered this little nursery in the hotel,” she says.

“So I just took off my shoes and walked barefoot in it, and immediately all my worries and tiredness went away. I was in a state of peace."