A victory garden once bloomed across from San Francisco’s City Hall. Photo courtesy the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
San Francisco artist Amy Franceschini seeks to reinvent the victory garden for a new age.
By Tara Austen Weaver
The year 1941 was not so different from today. Then, as now, our country was at war. Troops, supplies, and funds were being sent overseas. But there is one crucial difference: in World War II, citizens
were more personally involved in the war effort. They bought war bonds, women went to work in factories, and families across the nation ripped out their lawns and flowers in order to grow food. Propaganda posters of the era proclaimed, “Plant a Victory Garden: Our Food is Fighting.”
Within two years, 20 million families had responded to the challenge. Victory gardens were dug in backyards, outside businesses, in vacant lots, and on civic land such as the Boston Commons and Golden Gate Park. By 1945, such gardens were supplying 8 million
tons of food—40 percent of the domestic food supply.
Now, more than six decades later, Amy Franceschini hopes the time is ripe for a new sort of civic gardening effort. A visual artist and University of San Francisco art professor, she has launched a pilot program called Victory Gardens 2007+.
As an artist, Franceschini is drawn to what she calls “utopian ideas with real world applications.” These days, in addition to being at war, the country is also struggling with a food system that many consider dangerously out of control. Perhaps “victory” could also refer to greater independence from the industrial food system, an increased freedom from our dependence on oil, and a solution to the environmental impact of shipping our food over long distances.
Belgian roots
The inspiration for this project came from Ghent, Belgium, where Franceschini and her husband spend several months each year. One day, as she was pulling weeds outside their house, an old woman from the neighborhood began shouting at her in Flemish. The woman was telling her to save her receipts, that the city would reimburse her for gardening. The program is called Bebloemingsacties (“planting action”), and provides a twice-yearly subsidy to residents for seeds, soil, and plants. Franceschini wondered if something similar could be done in San Francisco.
When she returned from Belgium, Franceschini partnered with Garden for the Environment (GFE), San Francisco’s nonprofit demonstration garden located at 7th Avenue and Lawton. Unlike community gardens, GFE focuses on teaching, offering classes in gardening, composting, and permaculture. Education Program Manager Blair Randall was enthusiastic about the idea.
“Gardening and a knowledge of food is a lost practice,” he explains. “When we go about this project of enabling citizens to grow their own food, there needs to be an education attached. We need to teach them how to do it.”
Franceschini received a Fleishaker Foundation grant to fund an art project of her own devising, and a subsequent award from SFMOMA’s Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art. She put the funds into creating Victory
Gardens 2007+. The two-year project would include developing a starter gardening kit, establishing three test gardens, and working toward founding a seed bank.
A website is also integral to the project. “We want to document the program and keep it open so that others can learn from it,” Franceschini explains. “In the original victory gardens,
all the cities published journals, saying, ‘This is how we adopted it. Look at what we’re doing.’ We want it to be open source.”
Amy Franceschini plants seedlings for one of the first installations of Victory Gardens 2007+.
Testbeds for new ideas
The first phase of the program included three sample gardens—a communal household of students in the Richmond District (transition belt, weather-wise); a family in the Sunset District (fog belt); and a space that’s part of the Bayview Healing Arts Center (sun belt). Each set of gardeners took a pledge to tend the garden, harvest what was grown, and save the seeds. All gardens were inaugurated with planting parties that were open to the public.
On the day of the Sunset District planting party, the newly designed victory garden kit was delivered on a tricycle ridden by Arcangelo Wessells, a professional gardener who Franceschini hired with her grant funds. Within a few hours, the garden hosts and volunteers had built raised beds, filled them with soil, installed a timer-operated irrigation system, and planted seedlings. All the materials came from the kit.
The Richmond and Bayview gardens were placed with art students Franceschini met through her teaching, but for the other garden she posted a notice on Craigslist. She received 821 replies, some up to two pages long. The responses showed the diversity of the kind of people interested in this project.
“I got letters from single moms who can’t afford to shop at Rainbow [Grocery] the way they used to,” recalls Franceschini. “There were AIDS patients who need to have a controlled food source. There were people who didn’t want to garden, but had yards and wanted someone else to garden.” Franceschini selected the Lin family—Vincent, Wing, and their two sons, ages 4 and 6.
The test gardens showed how important education was to the project. A few weeks into the project, the Lin family asked Franceschini if someone could come show them which were the weeds and which were the crops. Once that was clarified, they were diligent weeders. “I’ve never seen such a clean garden,” Franceschini says.
Within a month or so the family had more bok choy than they could eat. “They bagged up the surplus and gave it to neighbors,” reports Randall, who serves as co-facilitator with Franceschini on the project.
Vincent Lin thinks the experience had a positive impact on his family. “It made us feel more like we are a family that can do things together,” he says. It was also an educational experience for his young sons. “It’s good for them to learn when they are young that they can make something with their own hands…they can recognize what is a strawberry and what is a green onion. They will know that there is so much diversity in nature.” Lin hopes more people participate in the program. “There is so much wasted land in the city,” he says, “we can make some use of it.”
The family has requested a second garden planting, underscoring the fact that an education component is necessary, to help gardeners continue on their own. Future participants in the program will be required to attend gardening classes.
The other garden sites did not fare as well. The students in the Richmond District were evicted from their house and their landlord ripped out the garden. “This highlights one of the issues we’re looking at,” says Franceschini. “In a rental situation, does the landlord get the equipment? Does it belong to the tenants?” The third site remains intact, but didn’t function as hoped. “It was more of a landscaping job,” she shrugs. “I think they just wanted a nice place to sit.” But even this outcome helped her refine the project vision: “It needs to be about growing food, and nurturing people to learn how to grow their own food.”
A matter of exponentials
With the first phase of the project now complete, Franceschini and Randall are planning for the future. Early on in the project they met with Matt Gonzalez, former member of the Board of Supervisors. Franceschini had volunteered for Gonzalez’s 2003 San Francisco mayoral campaign. He put the project team in touch with Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin. They had a meeting at City Hall and were surprised at the encouragement they received.
“The Department of the Environment was very supportive right away,” says Randall. “At that first meeting they said, ‘We’ll help you in any way possible.’” Franceschini and Randall requested funding for the project, space for a seed bank, and permission to reinstate victory gardens in Golden Gate Park. The pair recently received notification that the city will fund the project for one year, starting in January. The funds will cover the hiring of a full-time gardener, with money for research, development, and public relations.
“There’s historical precedence for this program, there are other models working in other cities, and the timing is good,” Franceschini explains. Recent publication of books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle have focused public attention on local eating; Oregon’s Food Not Lawns project has spawned regional chapters—and recently published a book; and in Canada, the Public Health Association of British Columbia is sponsoring a program called Every Lawn a Garden. At the San Francisco City Hall meetings, it was even pointed out that a victory garden program increases homeland security by providing a reliable food source.
The next stage of the program comprises 15 gardens to be planted in early 2008. Information is available on the project’s website (www.futurefarmers.com/victorygardens/), where there is also a “Backyard Registry,” where those already active in urban gardening can register their yards. This program will map areas of the city under cultivation.
Franceschini and Randall think the project has the potential to reinvent “victory” for a new age. “Today, victory is independence from a food system whose values we don’t support,” Randall says. “Having a bunch of carrots from your own garden, rather than from somewhere halfway across California, you are using less oil.” While it may not be possible for city residents to raise all their own food, people can at least supplement their purchasing with homegrown.
“It’s a matter of exponentials,” explains Randall. “If half the people who have space to grow food could grow just one bunch of their own carrots each month, that would be a profound act.”
With a city survey showing 1,822 acres of residential open space in San Francisco, that could amount to a lot of carrots. The taste of victory may be sweet indeed.
Tara Austen Weaver is a freelance writer and editor who writes about food, agriculture, travel, and art. She has been published in numerous anthologies, writes the food blog Tea & Cookies, and is currently working on a book titled The Butcher & The Vegetarian: One Woman’s Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis.
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