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| A Green and Pleasant Land: How England's Gardeners Fought the Second World War by Ursula Buchan – review | A Green and Pleasant Land: How England's Gardeners Fought the Second World War by Ursula Buchan – review |
| (6 months later) | |
| It's not just a soldier who marches on his stomach. A nation at war must be able to feed its civilian as well as martial population, and Britain in 1939 was by no means self-sufficient. The country was dangerously reliant on imported food, with even staples such as onions and carrots shipped in from abroad. If rationing was one solution to enemy blockades, the other was to increase food production by persuading what had always been a nation of gardeners to wield their spades and – in a slogan dreamed up by a young Michael Foot – dig for victory. | It's not just a soldier who marches on his stomach. A nation at war must be able to feed its civilian as well as martial population, and Britain in 1939 was by no means self-sufficient. The country was dangerously reliant on imported food, with even staples such as onions and carrots shipped in from abroad. If rationing was one solution to enemy blockades, the other was to increase food production by persuading what had always been a nation of gardeners to wield their spades and – in a slogan dreamed up by a young Michael Foot – dig for victory. |
| The result, as Ursula Buchan explains in this engaging and scrupulously researched history, was that vast swaths of the country were turned to the plough, among them parks, playing fields and bowling greens. Families were encouraged to dig up beloved roses in favour of patriotic cabbage and potatoes. The newly formed "land girls" took the place of farm boys, while the Women's Institute collected medicinal plants and turned gluts of plums into jam to succour a nation desperate for sugar (no one, it seems, was much impressed by carrot lollies). | The result, as Ursula Buchan explains in this engaging and scrupulously researched history, was that vast swaths of the country were turned to the plough, among them parks, playing fields and bowling greens. Families were encouraged to dig up beloved roses in favour of patriotic cabbage and potatoes. The newly formed "land girls" took the place of farm boys, while the Women's Institute collected medicinal plants and turned gluts of plums into jam to succour a nation desperate for sugar (no one, it seems, was much impressed by carrot lollies). |
| Buchan, herself a distinguished horticulturist, is particularly sensitive to the losses this vast agricultural push entailed, particularly for the nurserymen and stately home owners who stoically destroyed acres of valuable, cherished and often irreplaceable plants. She's good, too, on the consolations of gardens at a time when the very idea of a future seemed imperilled. All sorts of people, from housewives to prisoners of war, found solace in creating small regions of abundance and fertility, a counter to the annihilating wastefulness of war. It's an attitude best summed up by Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard, who refused to listen to Hitler on the radio, shouting back that he was planting irises, which would still be "flowering long after [Hitler] is dead". | Buchan, herself a distinguished horticulturist, is particularly sensitive to the losses this vast agricultural push entailed, particularly for the nurserymen and stately home owners who stoically destroyed acres of valuable, cherished and often irreplaceable plants. She's good, too, on the consolations of gardens at a time when the very idea of a future seemed imperilled. All sorts of people, from housewives to prisoners of war, found solace in creating small regions of abundance and fertility, a counter to the annihilating wastefulness of war. It's an attitude best summed up by Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard, who refused to listen to Hitler on the radio, shouting back that he was planting irises, which would still be "flowering long after [Hitler] is dead". |
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