The cover hides a garden: Gabriella Hirst’s Battlefield.

This publication is the companion piece of Battlefield, an artwork by Gabriella Hirst, a garden of plants, whose officially registered cultivar names reference theaters of war, armed conflict, and the military.

The plant varieties were bred and given these names over the last 500 years by various nurseries and individual breeders, for example, Peony “Victoire de la Marne” (registered and named in 1919); Rosa polyantha “Dunkerque” (1950); Rosa floribunda “Atombombe” (1953). Hirst has been researching, assembling, and tending to these plants since 2014 in the community gardens of the Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin, as part of a durational project questioning how the cultural memory of violent events is “gardened.”

The histories represented in the Battlefield garden are weedy, overgrowing, and rhizomatic. As a long-term project requiring constant pruning, winter-care, pricking-out, sowing, and reaping, the Battlefield project addresses entanglement of care and dominance in both western gardening practice and the historiography of war.