War Gardens

War Gardens
Author: Lalage Snow
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Civilians in war
ISBN: 9781787470712

A journey through the most unlikely of gardens: the oases of peace people create in the midst of war. In this millennium, we have become war weary. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Ukraine to South Sudan and Syria, from Kashmir to the West Bank, conflict is as contagious and poisonous as Japanese knotweed. Living through it are people just like us with ordinary jobs, ordinary pressures and ordinary lives. Against a new landscape of horror and violence it is up to them to maintain a modicum of normality and colour. For some, gardening is the way to achieve this. Working in the world's most dangerous war zones, freelance war correspondent and photographer Lally Snow has often chanced across a very moving sight, a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit in adversity, a celebration of hope and beauty: a war garden. In Kabul, the royal gardens are tended by a centenarian gardener, though the king is long gone; in Camp Bastion, bored soldiers improvise tiny gardens to give themselves a moment's peace; on both sides of the dividing line in Jerusalem families tend groves of olives and raise beautiful plants from the unforgiving, disputed landscape; in Ukraine, families tend their gardens in the middle of a surreal, frozen war. War Gardens is a surprising, tragic and beautiful journey through the darkest places of the modern world, revealing the ways people make time and space for themselves and for nature even in the middle of destruction.

Sowing the Seeds of Victory

Sowing the Seeds of Victory
Author: Rose Hayden-Smith
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2014-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1476615861

Sometimes, to move forward, we must look back. Gardening activity during American involvement in World War I (1917-1919) is vital to understanding current work in agriculture and food systems. The origins of the American Victory Gardens of World War II lie in the Liberty Garden program during World War I. This book examines the National War Garden Commission, the United States School Garden Army, and the Woman's Land Army (which some women used to press for suffrage). The urgency of wartime mobilization enabled proponents to promote food production as a vital national security issue. The connection between the nation's food readiness and national security resonated within the U.S., struggling to unite urban and rural interests, grappling with the challenges presented by millions of immigrants, and considering the country's global role. The same message--that food production is vital to national security--can resonate today. These World War I programs resulted in a national gardening ethos that transformed the American food system.