Victory Gardens Grow Seeds of Home
By Lindsay Kastner, Quotes Rose Hayden-Smith
Mysanantonio.com
June 6, 2008
Available online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/salife/gardening/stories/MYSA060708.1F.
Victory.276da58.html
Some families pass down recipes. Pamela Price’s family trades in garden lore.
Price grows her grandfather’s favorite flowers — zinnias — and is trying her hand at an heirloom tomato
variety he once grew. Her mother, Audrey Overall, is weighing in on what kind of greens to sow in the
fall.
“She keeps bringing it up, and she’s even found the seeds, bless her heart,” Price said.
Price, 37, has always been a gardener. She and her husband gardened in Austin and in Baton Rouge, La.,
where she picked up the French idea of the potager, or informal kitchen garden, where flowers and foods
grow together.
Now back in Texas, she is growing a victory garden in the backyard of her Leon Springs home, a passionate effort that is part patriotism, part homage to family.
First called war or liberty gardens, victory gardens got their start during the First World War and took off
during the second, when patriotic stateside families saw they could participate in the war effort by growing their own produce.
Price is one of many people hoping for resurgence of the movement. She’d like to see more people pick
up a spade and sow a few seeds — whether to save on rising food costs, to cultivate an appreciation for
fresh, local produce or to get back to the land via their suburban backyards.
Though her zucchini are doing quite well, Price doesn’t expect to feed the family from her backyard
plot, but she feels strongly that every little step toward self-sufficiency helps.
“Taking responsibility for my family frees up resources for the rest of the planet,” she said.
She hopes the next president will revive the idea of a victory garden on the White House lawn.
Rose Hayden-Smith, a garden educator and historian at the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said that during WWI, the federal government encouraged victory garwww.foodandsocietyfellows.org
dens with a marketing campaign including brochures, posters and how-to workshops.
“They came up with a bang-up program” and it had a lot of impact, said Hayden-Smith, who noted that
the concerns about food supply then were similar to current worries about food shortages related to
transportation.
“Gardening became a way to demonstrate a common purpose and to really do something practical for
our nation,” said Hayden-Smith, a Food and Society Policy Fellow.
In his 1919 book “The War Garden Victorious: It’s War Time Need and It’s Economic Value in Peace,”
Charles Lathrop Pack, president of the National War Garden Commission, argued that communities benefit from war gardens when money saved by individuals is reinvested in local economies and because
vacant plots are turned to better and more attractive use as gardens.
Hayden-Smith said it’s folly that the government is not doing more to support such gardens now, when
food banks are struggling, fuel costs are skyrocketing and everyday people have latched onto the notion
of eating produce grown close to home.
“I think all of these things are sort of converging right now,” she said.
Still, some local governments support various types of gardening programs and Hayden-Smith says
there’s a thriving grassroots movement to bring victory gardens back to the fore.
Price advocates for victory gardens on her blog, Red, White and Grew, writing about her mother’s gardening memories, the history and future of victory gardening and the progress of her own backyard plot.
A former magazine editor, Price said she’s taking this year to experiment and see what works in the
garden.
“I absolutely spend more time on the blog,” she said.
The garden is a tiny plot bursting with zucchini and cucumber vines, zinnias and tomatoes.
Both the gardening and blogging projects are sort of living memorials to Price’s grandfather, Glenn
Johnston, a World War I veteran and avid gardener. Johnston kept a wartime journal that referred often
to the vegetation in France.
“He talked about plants quite a lot,” Price said. “I just think that’s so telling that that’s how my family
views things.”
www.foodandsocietyfellows.org