A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War, by Ursula Buchan – review

Here are some statistics about wartime fruit- and vegetable-growing in England which this book tells us. In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland. But in a 1944 survey, it was discovered that only 34 per cent of urban gardens were growing fruit and vegetables, and only 10.9 per cent of households cultivated an allotment. The north-west of England turned out the worst figures, with only 28 per cent of households growing vegetables. As Ursula Buchan writes, ‘Picking sun-warmed greenhouse tomatoes to add to a salad is a pleasure; weeding round shot-holed brassicas on a windswept allotment is not.’ And this was what weary English householders worked out for themselves, as the war wore on.

Another slightly dispiriting statistic: in the chapter called ‘Fiercely Stirring Cauldrons’, about the 4,500 jam-making centres run by strong-armed women who heroically produced 1,670 tons of the stuff in 1941, Buchan tells us that all this effort made less than 0.5 per cent of the national requirement for rationed jam.

This book is so much about vegetables and fruit — potatoes and brassicas on every page, unless it’s damsons or compost — that I found it hard, immersed in this literary cornucopia of produce, to work out how successful the Dig for Victory campaign actually was. Cheering statistics like the ‘size of Rutland’ one were negated by ‘0.5 per cent of the national requirement’ ones.

What is certain is that the government understood the steadying effect of gardening on the British psyche: it was a great ‘release valve’ for tension. The expression ‘Dig for Victory’, coined (probably) by Michael Foot in an unsigned Evening Standard leader in September 1939, and used on the ensuing poster of a muddy boot pushing a spade into a heap of soil, made a huge impact and gave British people a sense that they could all do something to help the war effort, even if it was only to plant a row of leeks.