In memoriam: a tipi and a garden, II

[ by Charles Cameron — Memorial Day, USA ]

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2. The garden:

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The Chelsea Flower Show is one of the minor Great British Occasions — a stroll in the park with some of the Kingdom’s finest horticulturalists displaying their best, and not usually the place you’d go to be reminded of war, though the show itself does take place in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, the home of the Chelsea Pensioners…

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It is only appropriate, then, to find this picture of Skippy, a Pensioner from the Korean War, with Korean designer Hwang Ji-hae, whose garden this year won a gold medal for its representation of the DMZ between North and South Korea…

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with its abandoned watchtowers and partially overgrown barbed-wire fences…

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its bottles, carrying messages from those on one side of the line to friends and family unreachable on the other…

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its benches made of wood and dog-tags, its memories…

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and the wildflowers that have been taking over the DMZ, reasserting nature’s primacy where men’s wars were fought.

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Hwang Ji-hae named her garden Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden:

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