War gardens : a journey through conflict in search of calm / Lalage Snow

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"In this millennium, we have become war weary. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Ukraine to South Sudan and Syria, from Kashmir to the West Bank, conflict is as contagious and poisonous as Japanese knotweed. Living through it are people just like us with ordinary jobs, ordinary pressures and ordinary lives. Working in the world's most dangerous war zones, freelance war correspondent and photojournalist Lalage Snow has chanced across many testimonies to the triumph of the human spirit. In Kabul, the royal gardens are tended by a centenarian gardener, though the king is long gone; in Helmand Province, bored soldiers improvised a garden to give themselves a moment's peace and remind them of home; on both sides of the dividing line in The West Bank and Gaza, families cultivate beautiful plants from the unforgiving disputed landscape; in Ukraine, gardeners tend their land in the middle of a surreal, frozen war"--Inside front dust jacket.