Ornamental gardens created by Japanese American inmates in World War II incarceration camps present fresh insights into landscape history, theory, and interpretation. The camp gardens were a continuation of pre-incarceration traditions of garden building, human and cultural responses to the camp landscapes, restorative agents that promoted communal healing, and the results of cultural cohesion and community competition. They illustrated and enabled levels of resistance against confinement, and the design and form of the gardens helped to redefine Japanese traditions and resisted the War Relocation Authority's Americanization regime. Some gardens also functioned as political symbols of sedition and noncompliance as well as loyalty and patriotism, and these were often used as staging grounds for political acts.