During WWII, citizens were encouraged to grow nutrient dense vegetables and were also mandated to comply with national rationing and price controls. A national Food Fights for Freedom campaign enlisted citizens in producing, conserving, and sharing food resources during the war . During both wars, gardens were a key strategy to both produce food for nutritional needs and encourage at home participation in the war efforts. During both wars significant federal and state government support assisted the rapid development of extensive garden networks. Liberty gardens in 1918 numbered 5,285,000 and produced $525 million worth of food. In 1917, the Bureau of Education’s Office of School and Home Gardening was turned into the United States School Garden Army and was funded with $250,000 in federal funds and frequently state or local funds as well . During WWII, while there was no formal School Garden Army, the Office of Education advocated for school victory gardening. The USDA took an active role in promoting victory gardens through statewide conferences and inspiring the formation of state victory garden councils, which would implement federal policy . By 1944, victory gardens provided 40% of American’s domestic food . During both wars in some locales, such as Dayton, OH, the city councils or other agencies took an active role in finding land resources for schools and other gardens, while in other locales, voluntary associations took on this task . In Chicago during WWI, a coalition of local government officials, businessmen, and social reformers worked together to map Chicago’s growing gardening projects to facilitate better coordination. They then went on to publicize garden efforts and distribute over 150,000 copies of educational material on gardening while also setting up demonstration gardens in each of the city’s major parks,growing strawberries vertically totaling seventeen demonstration gardens by 1918.

San Francisco was significantly engaged in both the liberty and victory garden efforts . In 1918 a municipally announced ‘War Garden Day’ was celebrated with a parade of over one thousand soldiers and civilians marching together next to floats decorated with homegrown vegetables, garden themed entertainment, and by breaking ground on a new demonstration garden at the local High School of Commerce .Similarly, San Francisco hosted an annual victory gardens fair from 1943-1945 that provided garden education, entertainment and vegetable exhibitions by local growers to thousands of fair attendees each year . John Brucato led the San Francisco Victory Garden Council from 1941 – 45 . Beginning with articles in the San Francisco News and San Francisco Examiner on food gardening techniques, Brucato, a UC Davis educated farmer, businessman, and politically savvy individual, built a relationship with San Francisco Junior College . This partnership led to the development of the San Francisco Victory Garden Council, which brought together garden clubs, service organizations, labor groups, and others interested in the effort. Initially the Council focused on outreach and education to homeowners, then on the cultivation of vacant lots, and then they turned their sites to the development of large community garden projects. The first of these larger developments was located in Golden Gate Park where four hundred 20×20 foot plots were allocated to families. Similar projects were developed in Glen Park Reservoir Site where 350 garden plots were allocated, and then at Laguna Honda county hospital where 400 nine hundred square foot plots were developed . By 1942 the Council had almost reached their goal of developing 60,000 Victory Gardens. Together these projects combined with the other work of the Council became known as the “Backyard Revolution”. Brucato’s work was lauded as a national model by the Department of Agriculture. It is notable to state that San Francisco has a significant presence of peri-urban gardens and truck farms in Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese communities prior to WWII . During the war period Brucato also worked to develop San Francisco’s first farmers market to support some of these truck farms and struggle farmers in surrounding rural communities.

The market attracted over 135 farmers on its first Saturday and sold produce to over 50,000 people . During both wars, home production and community gardening were emphasized. Community gardens on larger pieces of land were encouraged for their efficient use of land, tools and water and their social benefits . During WWII large community gardens with more established sets of rules became more common. Rules against theft, vandalism, and even trespassing were established to protect the work of gardeners . Homeowners were also targeted by propaganda encouraging people to take out their lawns and plant gardens. In a Columbia University War paper discussing home lawns and flower gardens, Brown argued “the most inexcusable of Idle Acres is the fertile and tended acre that fails to contribute its share to the nation’s staple food supply at a time of national need” . Home backyard garden production continued to be promoted after the end of the war. In national home ownership campaigns, the garden was a valued asset by builders, real estate agents and buyers as an essential component of the American home . Following WWII, while some advocated for the importance of permanent public gardening, vacant-lot and community gardening largely disappeared from the US urban landscape. Although subsistence gardening played a dominant role in the urban landscape in Columbus, Ohio from 1900 to 1940 , post WWII, gardens disappeared materially and discursively from city space and the telling of Columbus history. The use of urban planning and land use discourse that claimed gardening was contrary to “modern” development played a key role in this the postwar disappearance of gardens. Post-war planners increasingly saw agriculture as a threat to urban health and safety and used zoning to move this threat out of the city . In addition, the still dominant discourse of gardening as a response to crisis helped to normalize their erasure once the crisis had passed and other urban development schemes dominated. Backyard gardening was promoted as a hobby by magazines like House and Garden, but for those without access to backyards it was unclear where, if at all, gardens had a place in the city. The Washington D.C. Victory Garden commission went as far as to state, “[victory] gardening has not place as a ‘proper peacetime municipal function’” . During this period increasingly racist home lending, government benefits, and housing sales, made homeownership a reality for many white families.

Thus home gardening with secure tenure was a possibility for these families but was not for many African American, Chinese American, Japanese American, Mexican American, and other racially or ethnically excluded communities. Still gardening persisted in many of these communities as African American families with slave histories moved north and west and brought agricultural practices with them,drainage planter pot just as Mexican American landholders who had been disposed of their lands brought agricultural histories with them to California backyards and city lots. A prominent San Francisco example are the Chinese peri-urban gardens of the early 1900s. Gardening in Chinese communities in Southeast San Francisco and Oakland was a common practice and provided significant amounts of produce to local markets . Chinese gardeners were denied rights to own land and most gardeners had lost access to their gardens by the 1940s through building development or the expansion of Italian and Portuguese gardens. Work with Chinese gardeners is notably missing from Brucato’s account of WWII gardener and truck farmer assistance efforts. Post WWII home ownership became a depoliticizing force for garden efforts in white communities, as increasing numbers of individuals had access backyard gardens. At the same time, in racially marginalized communities, where home ownership was suppressed, collective garden projects grew in importance during subsequent moments of resistance to racist urban redevelopment projects that displaced communities of color.In the interwar period, during the Great Depression, several relief efforts used gardens as a means to improve the food security of and constructively occupy unemployed workers and poor families. Similar to the war gardens, relief garden efforts received significant state and federal support and funding. As such these garden efforts were more top-down than many of the urban gardens of the early twentieth century . Garden programs were more supported during the beginning of the depression from 1931-1935 than the later years . Two forms of gardens were most common: the work-relief garden and the subsistence garden. Work-relief gardens provided workers with a wage to collectively garden large tracts of land where food was produced and then sent to food relief programs. In 1934, gardens produced 36 percent of fruits and vegetables used in relief efforts. Similar to past urban gardening efforts, subsistence gardens provided gardeners with land, seeds, and education for production for home use. State and federal governments spent $3 billion on the creation of relief gardens in the three-year time span between 1932 -35 . In 1935, federal relief work shifted focus towards the Works Progress Administration and in 1937 the distribution of excess agricultural commodities through the Food Stamp Program .5Depression era garden advocates also encouraged the use of vacant or unused lands. Manuals suggested groups survey vacant land in their communities and partner with real estate boards, industry, railroads, and public agencies for use of their spaces . Many companies started gardening programs of their own to provide relief for workers who had been fired or had their hours reduced. Some national companies went as far as to require all local plants to start gardening programs. In 1932 more than forty railroad companies had encouraged their employees to garden on railroad owned land .

Some companies went beyond providing land for subsistence gardens. The B.F. Goodrich Company encouraged workers to participate in a collective farm, which used labor rotations and centralized planning to produce and distribute over one million pounds of vegetables . Cooperative farming supported by the employer was found to make significant contributions to the needs of the community during this depression period according to a company report released in 1933 . Overall, like earlier waves of gardening which relied on borrowed lands from employers, public agencies, and private owners of vacant lands usually located at the city’s edge, work relief and subsistence gardens were always intended to be temporary solutions to the problems of urban poor. The discourse on vacant lots to be filled with temporary gardens has been a persistent theme in the history of US gardening, one that Luke and Lawson identify as a barrier to the development of gardens as a permanent institution in urban land use. Community gardens resurfaced in the 1970s after a period of post-WWII disfavor. Bassett identifies two reasons for this rise of community gardening in this time of economic stagflation: the rise of food prices and the growing environmental movement. Others argue that the gardens of the 1970s were more closely connected to the civil rights and urban social movements of that time . Unlike many gardens earlier in US history, these efforts were largely gardener driven and managed in both planning and development . In urban centers across the nation, gardening was embraced as a means to resist top down urban renewal, promote more sustainable agricultural practices, and reimagine the urban environment. Gardening became a part of the alternative open space movement in which playgrounds, miniparks, and garden spaces were developed on small sites that were often overlooked but became highly integrated into community use . While community gardening experienced a lull in the 1950s and 60s, backyard gardening’s popularity continued to grow. By 1973, over 80 million Americans were gardening as a hobby . In the late sixties many sought to transform this hobby into a strategy for more ecological and sustainable living, forging a relationship between ecological agriculture and urban sustainability that is still vibrant today. Across the country many urban garden projects were explicitly connected to efforts to resist racialized urban renewal. In the 1960s and 70s in Boston, Mel King and many others organized in historically black communities to gain a voice in urban and community development . King, a leader or the Eastern Massachusetts Urban League and organizer committed to local control and governance of land, spearheaded the passage of a bill in 1976 that made it possible to claim unused land for community gardens . Six gardens were developed that summer.