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Paper short abstract

Tree planting and gardening have become key commemorative practices in wartime Ukraine, shifting memory from static monuments to living landscapes. Amid ecological devastation, planting embodies mourning, healing, and restoration—even for communities rooted in traditional memorial forms.

Paper long abstract

In the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion, tree planting and gardening have become vital commemorative gestures in Ukraine, offering alternatives to the monumental, anthropocentric memorial tradition inherited from Soviet visual culture. Despite the ongoing war, there is a strong societal need for acts of remembrance enacted now, within everyday life and shared spaces. Increasingly, commemoration takes root through living forms: trees, shrubs, gardens, and the act of planting itself.

A striking example is the “Posadka” memorial in Zaporizhzhia — a large-scale kinetic monument that reimagines the memorial landscape as a sound grove. Such gestures echo historical “posadkas” — Soviet-era shelterbelts in the steppe and, during the war, defensive positions — while imbuing them with new meanings tied to mourning, resilience, and local agency. On a smaller scale, villagers in Lviv region planted currant bushes in memory of fallen soldiers, merging intimate rural gestures with collective mourning.

Contemporary artists also explore arboreal and gardening imagery: Karina Synytsia and Anastasiia Pustovarova work with trees and green growth as carriers of memory; Kateryna Aliinyk turns to soil as both material and metaphor; and the collective project “Situational Flowerbeds” uses urban greenery as a site of participatory social performance of mourning.

Through gardens and trees, landscapes become active participants in memory-making, offering living, processual counterpoints to static monuments. The ecological devastation of war further reshapes commemorative impulses: even communities with traditionally conservative approaches to memorialization increasingly seek to restore damaged ecosystems and landscapes, intertwining ecological recovery with collective remembrance.