- Author: Chris M. Webb
In hard times, Americans have always turned to gardening. Gardens enable people to improve their food security. Plus gardens have many other benefits.
The Victory Gardens of World War I and World War II - and the garden efforts of the Great Depression - helped Americans increase home and community food security. In addition to helping the family budget and improving nutrition, these gardens helped to save fuel by reducing transportation; provided natural beauty in communities; empowered every citizen to contribute to a national effort; and bridged social, ethnic, class, age and cultural differences during times when cooperation was vital.
We are in the midst of a new cycle of a garden movement. While there are...
- Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
For more than a hundred years, gardening has been linked to service in American communities. Reformers used school and community gardens to improve aspects of urban life, to educate children, to feed the hungry, to provide training to those facing economic challenges. Today, the University of California models service through gardening via its Master Gardener Program, which fields thousands of highly trained gardens who provide support for school, home and community gardens across the state.
Our nation has many needs right now. Families are economically insecure. (This is an understatement). Communities are food-insecure. Obesity is epidemic; the figures on childhood obesity...
- Author: Chris M. Webb
Rose Hayden-Smith, Ventura County Cooperative Extension director and U.S. historian is passionate about the power and possibilities inherent in gardening. She uses her extensive knowledge of homefront war efforts to help influence public policy in regards to local food systems.
Earlier this year Dr. Hayden-Smith gave a lecture, Victory Gardens: Join the Garden Revolution, at the San Diego Natural History Museum about this topic.
More about the lecture.
At no point in our lifetimes has the interest in gardening, urban...
- Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
I collect gardening catalogs. To me, they represent life and productivity and the promise of family, good food and good health. They also provide a link to a simpler, agrarian past that I find comforting and restorative in these unsettling times. In a world where oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, violence seems unchecked, compassion towards the less fortunate seems to have evaporated and economic misery abounds, I find gardening catalogs a refuge of optimism. We need fewer bad things in this world and more good gardens.
I’ve spent more time this year sitting in the chair in my garden in the evening, thinking about what this small cultivated area says about these times, this world and my life. I’ve resisted buying many...