ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with nature in spaces of burial and commemoration, larger ideologies are rendered visible. It considers commemorative landscaping at two site-specific Holocaust memorials, and highlights these categories of use: formal garden design, considered here via the example of the razed Czech village of Lidice, and the ostensibly wilder model of the nature-garden. The chapter examines in the context of the concentration camp memorial at Birkenau, Poland. It explains the management and ideological signification of natural materials by both the National Socialists of the Third Reich, who shaped the early landscaping of the sites in question, and the contemporary memorial practitioners who now curate them. Appropriating the term 'curator' from the, it also interrogates outdoor memorial spaces through interpretive strategies that have more frequently been applied inside museum walls. These strategies are mobilized in an examination of the way both formal and 'natural' memorial landscape management incorporates horticultural practices of 'fencing in' and 'weeding out'.
