Urban-gardening organizations such as the Gorge Tillicum Urban Farmers, Victoria’s Compost Education Centre, the Horticultural Centre of the Pacific, as well as initiatives such as the Haultain Commons and Life Cycles’ fruit-tree project, have helped to build on the region’s reputation as Canada’s West Coast horn of plenty.
Municipalities are responding. Victoria has developed draft guidelines for boulevard gardening and is considering allowing rooftop gardens, as well as community gardens within parks. Saanich provided its own example of a boulevard garden last year by growing cabbages on the Pat Bay Highway median. Garden plots started and tended by Cook Street and Fort Street restaurants, the streetside garden on Pandora Avenue and the food gardens at local schools bring food production at its most basic back to the people.
The movement satisfies important social needs — food availability and quality, food security, the whole-food movement, local food culture and community.
But something as interesting is taking place. Digging in the dirt for food has acquired status.
For much of the region’s colonized history, homeowners grew vegetables, tended fruit trees and raised chickens and maybe a cow or two because they had little choice if they wanted to keep their families fed throughout the year. Typically, only the well-to-do could afford expanses of lawn and flower beds — and the help to tend them. The help also looked after wealthy families’ kitchen gardens and the more extensive farms and orchards up the Peninsula or at Shawnigan Lake that stocked well-to-do larders.
Then two wars brought about economic and social change. The Depression and Second World War saw renewed gardening vigour at the household scale. At first, it was prompted by necessity, then by patriotism. The food fed the family, with abundance swapped among neighbours and friends.
After the war, most Victory gardens were plowed under and sodded over. Stay-at-home moms tended what remained, as well as the new flowerbeds, while dad cranked up the lawnmower on the weekend.
By the 1970s, food gardens had shrunk again. Who had time? Most household adults were working. Soon, two incomes were needed to pay the mortgage and cable bills. The 1990s environmental movement saw an increase in recycling programs, but not in homegrown veggies. Gardening for food was decidedly out of fashion.
And here we are. The wheel has turned, and we’re seeking sod to turn in our few spare, leisure hours. Yes, we seek community, health, good food and flavour. We seek to muck in the mud to counter our hectic middle-class lives. Deep down, we also seek opportunity to proclaim, for example, that the pasta we’ve served is seasoned with basil grown just outside — aren’t we awesome! — and to enjoy the resulting admiration.
Signs of status have always stood in reaction to “common” experience. In eras when 99 per cent of the population was perpetually undernourished and had to labour to put food on the table, well-fed plumpness signified wealth and leisure. When the masses moved indoors to spend their days at desks, and advances in agriculture and transportation made food abundant and accessible, waistlines expanded and muscles lost definition. As a result, status came unstuck from plump shapeliness and became synonymous with stick-thinness.
The popularity of sun-bronzed skin followed a similar pattern — until melanoma’s causes became understood and pale celebrities used their influence to encourage skin health. When most people could afford only hearty whole-grain bread, those clinging to social standards or aspirations sought out white bread. Now, rustic peasant loaves sell for a premium at artisan bakeries.
As for urban gardening, real-estate prices in the region have skyrocketed and lot sizes have shrunk while houses have grown. Space to grow food is becoming ever rarer, therefore more valued.
As has free time.
And, so, plots of greens and veggies have become their own quiet status statements amidst the noise and fuss.
Fad or flavour, fashion or freshness, I’m happy to applaud my gardening neighbours’ efforts. And to help out with the surplus bounty.
