'That Dastardly Plot’: Gardens as Weapon of War and Peace

This book (2021) originates from a symposium, AFTERSTORM: Turbulence, Gardens, Conflict, December 2019, which was hosted by the Royal Botanic Barden in their historic Herbarium auditorium and associated with a major exhibition titled Turbulence, Conflict and the Garden of Remediation, of works by Charles Green, Lyndell Brown, Paul Gough and Jon Cattapan, held in Domain House Gallery, which was once the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. The exhibition’s and the symposium’s rationale in abbreviated form. The symposium and exhibition explores the way in which: Plants have figured as talismans of home, as memory-triggers, as souvenirs, as medicines and, now, as harbingers of conflict-driven climate change. Gardens and plants, within the long, panoramic perspective of a century of war and conflict, have had unexpected but entwined relationships with times of great storm and turbulence. Across the last one hundred years of wars and humanitarian disasters, gardens have figured as refuges. At the same time, a wide variety of landscapes, from desolate wastes to Australian bush valleys, have been re-imagined as gardens. Gardens and plants have held a place within the movements of human beings embedded in turbulent flows, within vast, involuntary refugee and asylum seeker displacements, and within conflicts and humanitarian crises.