2008 Woodie Awards
Harking back to harder times
In the country's last surviving public victory gardens, a wartime tradition retains a small place among the flowers.
Derek Hawkins and Marc Larocque
Issue date: 7/3/07 Section: Focus
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Many of the 300 gardeners who own plots say they go there to escape cramped apartment life and city commotion. But the roars of Red Sox fans from nearby Fenway Park and the sight of the Prudential building towering above the phragmites are reminders of what this place is - one of the country's largest and oldest urban gardens.
The garden plots range from bedroom-sized patches of soil to large yards. Some are crafted to be works of horticultural art, meticulously prim, orderly and lush with color.
Others, however, seem to lack, or at least downplay, aesthetics. These are the vegetable gardens, which compose less than one quarter of the plots there. Concerned less with design and appearance and more with efficiency of space and soil, the vegetable gardens represent a Fenway Victory Gardens legacy that has endured since their inception in 1942.
So-called victory gardens, some public, like those in Fenway, and some private, were encouraged by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of a nationwide effort to supplement canned food rationing during World War II. By 1944 some 20 million victory gardens produced nearly 40 percent of the vegetables and fruits Americans consumed, according to the Department of Agriculture.
The Fenway Victory Gardens are the last surviving public gardens created during the war. But more than a half-century later they are far from the produce-generating hubs they were in harder times. Designed gardens, rife with flowers, ferns, shrubs and decorative objects, are now ubiquitous. Vegetable gardens, rooted in a wartime tradition, occupy a smaller niche.
Most gardeners rarely acknowledge a difference. But today's makeup of the Fenway Victory Gardens reflects the attitudes of the community and a social climate that has changed across generations.
Different methods, a common appreciation
Rick Malkasian and Tony Siracuso are self-proclaimed designers. Together, they tend one of the Fenway Victory Gardens' biggest plots, which they have amassed since they began gardening more than 20 years ago.
Their garden is about equal in area to a suburban front yard and abounds with carefully pruned bushes, color-schemed flower beds and healthy shrubs.
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Steve Patterson
posted 7/03/07 @ 5:00 PM EST
My wife and I visited Boston 3 years ago and I took her to the Victory Gardens. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Papalambros in his garden plot. He took the time to shows us around and offered us some of his fresh tomatoes. (Continued…)
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