Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut had spent a lot of time in refugee camps. While there, he started noticing and documenting the small gardens he found there.
These ranged from small containers of dirt to a row of trees that would provide shade for their tents in a few years’ time.
These plants came from all sorts of places: cuttings or seeds they found in their surroundings or even a small shop in the refugee plant shop.
Other plants took an even more unlikely route: some migrants, knowing that they might never return, uproot their favorite plants before abandoning their homes. Nura, a Syrian woman living in the Bekaa Valley, cultivated a cutting of a sea fig in a glass of water; the specimen was a gift from a fellow-refugee. He had carried the plant on his journey from Syria. It reminds Nura of the garden she left behind in her home town of Idlib.
“When you put a seed in the ground and it grows, you made that piece of soil a little bit yours,” Wildschut says.
This reminded me of something I saw during an exposition in Palestine.
Israel would announce they would bomb an area, and people had 10 minute to evacuate. In those precious few moments, some took a few orange seeds with them. This would help them continue their family legacy at some future point, back in the place where it started, or in their new home.
These two stories illustrate the power that nature and plants have the ability to give us control in a situation where most have been lost.
No matter how small or insignificant those gardens in camps might seem to someone looking in from the outside, they are something these people control.
This gives them something of their own. Something that takes them from being a victim to being a rebel against that.
I highly recommend the other work by Henk Wildschut.
Leave a Reply