Description
During the First and Second World Wars, the German, UK, and US government all launched national initiatives to foster “wartime gardening” among their non-enlisted citizens. ‘Victory gardens’ had a double function: enrolling the home public to the war effort and stimulating the national production of vegetables to counter food scarcity. In these countries, massive campaigns were launched to ask citizens to grow fruit and vegetables in their houses and other public spaces. Profoundly patriotic in nature, the propagandistic effort adopted an exquisitely martial rhetoric, deploying slogans such as ‘every garden a munition plant’, or ‘sow the seeds of victory!’. This paper centres ‘victory gardens’ as an under researched martial practice that plays a central role in the cultural and material production of military victory. It shows that wartime gardening is but one of many seemingly peaceful victory practices. The paper concludes that in the critical study of war a new ontology of military victory is needed: one that straddles the lines between war and peace and that can attend to both kinetic and non-kinetic practices of wars.
