'A remarkable book . . . It's a powerful testament to the healing balm of gardening and the resilience of the human spirit in the direst of circumstances.' Financial Times 'Not a happy book and yet it's magically heartening. It makes a gardener question his or her values.' The Times 'This extraordinary book...warm and engaging...like a photograph magicked to life.' Spectator 'Snow has spent ten years as a photographer and filmmaker covering unrest . . . Throughout that time she has sought comfort in green oases and come to understand "how vital gardens are 'against a horrid wilderness' of war". . . There can be few counter-narratives as enchanting and sad as those Snow recounts in War Gardens.' Times Literary Supplement 'For all these victims of war, their gardens are places in which to breathe, providing moments of calm, hope and optimism in a fragile life of horror and uncertainty. For many, it helps them to grieve. Books seldom bring a lump to my throat, but this one did.' Spectator 'What makes War Gardens the most illuminating garden book to be published this year, is the realisation that people's gardens are the antidotes to the horrors of their surroundings.' Country Life A journey through the most unlikely of gardens: the oases of peace people create in the midst of war In this millennium, we have become war weary. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Ukraine to South Sudan and Syria, from Kashmir to the West Bank, conflict is as contagious and poisonous as Japanese knotweed. Living through it are people just like us with ordinary jobs, ordinary pressures and ordinary lives. Against a new landscape of horror and violence it is up to them to maintain a modicum of normality and colour. For some, gardening is the way to achieve this. Working in the world's most dangerous war zones, freelance war correspondent and photographer Lally Snow has often chanced across a very moving sight, a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit in adversity, a celebration of hope and beauty: a war garden. In Kabul, the royal gardens are tended by a centenarian gardener, though the king is long gone; in Camp Bastion, bored soldiers improvise tiny gardens to give themselves a moment's peace; on both sides of the dividing line in Jerusalem families tend groves of olives and raise beautiful plants from the unforgiving, disputed landscape; in Ukraine, families tend their gardens in the middle of a surreal, frozen war. War Gardens is a surprising, tragic and beautiful journey through the darkest places of the modern world, revealing the ways people make time and space for themselves and for nature even in the middle of destruction. Illustrated with Lally Snow's own award-winning photography, this is a book to treasure.

This 1919 book describes both the success of the war garden in helping to reduce food shortages during the World War I period and the necessity for maintaining these gardens during peacetime.

A history of wartime gardens documents how they humanize landscapes and experience, even under the direst conditions

Sometimes, to move forward, we must look back. Gardening activity during American involvement in World War I (1917–1919) is vital to understanding current work in agriculture and food systems. The origins of the American Victory Gardens of World War II lie in the Liberty Garden program during World War I. This book examines the National War Garden Commission, the United States School Garden Army, and the Woman’s Land Army (which some women used to press for suffrage). The urgency of wartime mobilization enabled proponents to promote food production as a vital national security issue. The connection between the nation’s food readiness and national security resonated within the U.S., struggling to unite urban and rural interests, grappling with the challenges presented by millions of immigrants, and considering the country’s global role. The same message—that food production is vital to national security—can resonate today. These World War I programs resulted in a national gardening ethos that transformed the American food system.

With The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn, Merrill Joan Gerber demonstrates yet again her talent for pure and natural prose that penetrates the depths of human emotion. Her new novel illuminates the lives of three generations of women belonging to a Jewish American family in New York. Arriving from Poland at the turn of the century, sisters Rachel and Rose discover their fates on New York's Lower East Side. Later, Rachel's daughters, Ava, Musetta, and Gilda, live the passionate drama of their family's destiny as two wars rage in the world around them. In peace and war, the men they love bring them both ecstasy and bitter grief. Musetta's daughters, Issa and Iris, carry the story to its poignant close as the Second World War ends. With a delicate touch yet piercing insight, Gerber explores the yearnings, loves, and struggles of women who try to adapt the Jewish rituals of the "old country" to the realities of the new world.

Includes over 800 recipes for using fresh vegetables, plus essential gardening information and ideas on how to use your harvest.