The History of School Gardens: A Conversation With Author Rose Hayden-Smith

Most people Haven't heard of the term "Farm to School."  Once the concept is explained to them, usually the next thing to explain is.. what is a school garden?  Typically, folks assume that school gardens are a relatively new thing.  Join us as we talk with Rose Hayden-Smith about the very long and interesting history of school gardens in the USA and the world. 

Transcript

History of SG- Author Rose Hayden Smith

Transcript

00:00:07 Rick

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how youth thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook and eat delicious, nutritious local foods in schools across the country.

00:00:20 Michelle

And the world! We're your hosts, I'm Michelle Markesteyn.

00:00:23 Rick

And I'm Rick Sherman.

00:00:26 Michelle

And I am thrilled to introduce our guest to you all today as one of my heroes in the whole field of school gardening and food systems, Doctor Rose, Hayden Smith, writer, US historian, and America from University of California, Hi Rose!

00:00:42 Rose Hayden-Smith

Hi, Michelle. It's so nice to speak with you.  And Rick, today, so nice to connect again.

00:00:48 Michelle

Yeah. Thank you so much.

00:00:50 Rick

I always say, well, if you start looking at school gardens, school gardens and. There's gardens at school. And so people think. Yeah, there's a lot of gardens at schools, like in Oregon. We have half of our schools of 788 of our gardens half of our schools have a garden, but they think it's a brand new thing. They think it's. Oh, that's a new thing. And that's clearly not the case. Right Rose?

00:01:17 Rose Hayden-Smith

No, it's not the case. And I always also think of school gardens within a larger context of home and community gardening and school gardens have been around for a long, long, long time. A rich history of them in Europe and the United States, and one of the things that inspired me, you know, early on, was learning about the history of school gardens in my own community and that there is a school, whereas a 4H advisor and a garden educator that I worked at called Lincoln Elementary School. And it's on Ventura’s Main Street. And the precursor school was Anne St. Elementary. And you know, during World War One, the students at Ann Street Elementary raised potatoes at the school and kind of depressed the local market for farmers, right. And reading about a little bit. In these University of California AG experiment documents, going back to the beginning of the last country where teachers from my community were writing to the farm advisors at the University of California, not only asking for gardening advice, but telling them what they were seeing as the value of school gardens and their impact on the well-being of children.

00:03:07 Rick

OK. And you were so passionate about this, you wrote a book about school gardens in America called sowing the seeds of Victory, American gardening programs of World War One. And I'll leave a note to that in our show notes. But could you tell us about the journey of that 14 years ago when you wrote that? Why were you so excited about this?

00:03:29 Rose Hayden-Smith

Hey, well, Michelle knows this story and basically the story was that when I was a much younger person, I was hired by the University of California to run the 4H program in Ventura County.  A large 4H program, all sorts of community clubs all over this county, which has a really rich agricultural tradition and sort of like a, you know, Perry urban farming, just a really rich food systems environment and I didn't know what I was doing, but the University of California assigned a mentor to me, and his name was Dan Desmond and Dan Desmond told me early on, he said, one of the best things that you could do to set up a really wonderful sort of holistic educational experience would be to develop a focus for a school gardening and that will open up sort of become a gateway for food systems education.  And I just went. I love this idea. So I got all sorts of support from the University of California, and I proceeded to do that. And so I not only did like garden based learning, but I got into sort of like, you know, farm to school and then I also took on managing a master gardener program for my community, my county, through the Cooperative Extension Office, and the work just kept compounding and I've always been a historian at heart.  And one day, Dan forwarded an article to me and the article was written by a librarian in the state of Texas OL Davis, and it was about something I've never heard of called the United States School Garden Army. And I went what is this?  And so I did a little tiny bit of research on it and I went, you know what?  I'm going to go back to school and so I pursued a dual track as a garden based educator and A food systems person at the university. And then I went back to the University of California, Santa Barbara to earn a Masters and a PhD, and I basically, you know, just focused my energy on historical research about school, home and community gardening in the United States. On my dissertation, we focused on the period of World War One, and that became the book.

00:06:24 Rick

You had that whole chapter in there about the school garden army that was just fascinating. And if people just do a search for that, you'll find lots of images of what I guess you could call propaganda posters or whatever of back in the day to get people you know interested in that. Tell us our listeners why they wanted to do a school garden army and promote this?

00:06:56 Rose Hayden-Smith

Well, sure, you know, it was a World War One program and it was really interesting because that program came out of the Bureau of Education and it was one of the first, if not the first, sort of soft national curriculum pieces, right?  And so it was multi purpose because there were many partners in the work, so it was wartime. So they definitely wanted to sort of focus on building a sort of sense of common purpose around the World War. One effort they wanted to raise food on the home front, they wanted to teach kids about ag and gardening because they had the same concerns more than 100 years ago, that those of us who work in the food system today have, that kids were becoming disconnected from their food supply, that kids needed to be out in nature more.  There was certainly an idea about improving nutrition by some people right home economy, beautifying cities right, and sort of urban uplift. The idea of garden as a way to strengthen democracy, which I think is one of the more wonderful ideas about it, and there definitely was a very practical aspect which would perhaps enable more food to be sent to mobilize troops and to European allies during wartime because food security in Europe was very low during World War One. But you know, people had all these. The organizers had all these different goals, and it was a really interesting program. I mean, garden educators were deployed to schools and to communities to help with school gardens. It was a real heyday of school gardens. And the kids that were involved were encouraged to also do gardening activities at home and in the community, and there was a lot of propaganda, you know, the posters in World War One right and some of the most prominent artists, commercial artists in American life jumped on board and created some of the most beautiful poster art in our nation's history and I would really encourage people to go to the Library of Congress website and look up the United States School Garden Army. And you can look at the poster collection and it's just you've seen the images. 

00:09:25 Rick

Yes.  They're stunning. And there's examples in your book, too. I'll. I'll leave a note in our show notes about the Library of Congress link and more. So. I mean, there was no National School lunch program back in World War One, and we, like you said, we wanted our food to go over to the troops. And so, If we're going to feed our kids, it made sense to do this, and they even said things like they called the gardener soldiers and, you know, they're growing, you know, ammo or whatever. But it was it was very interesting program. Yeah, as you said.

00:10:16 Rose Hayden-Smith

Yeah, it really was. And I, you know, there was a lot of militarized rhetoric around the program, you know, United States School Garden Army.. And sort of, but putting the importance of home gardens up there with, you know, as being fundamental to American defense, right. And a lot of that sort of imagery and rhetoric and I think that, you know, Insignia for the kids uniforms and I think that if you were going to do, you know, a national program now and that's not the kind of frame that I think you'd select, right when it was wartime and, you know, it was over 100 years ago. But really, you know, remarkable program and it really impacted the Victory Garden program in World War Two because a number of the people who were involved in launching the national, the very iconic Victory Garden program of World War Two were people who had been children in World War One and participated in the United States School Garden Army and or participated in sort of the Liberty Victory Garden programs of all War One.

00:11:40 Rick

OK. And I think the first half of your book talks about that history and history about a great multitude of things not in, not only in school gardens, but like you said, just American gardening, American gardening as a whole. But I was thinking too this book came out kind of in the infancy of the of the resurgence of the school garden movement 14 years ago, and so it was one of the first books, or really only books that broached that subject. Now, if you had to write it today, a second edition, would you make changes now or would you do anything different? Or where do you see future subjects?

00:12:24 Rose Hayden-Smith

But if I were gonna write more to the story, one of the things that I would focus more on would be inclusion. Right. And a more critical look at where those programs because they were created at a certain time in our nation, what they missed and the lessons that we take from them, what we would carry forward into our current work inclusion right and looking more critically at people needing land and access, which is kind of problematic sometimes. Right now in, unless we make some changes and by the way, World War One might provide some models for that because there were property easements that made gardening possible along like railroad easements and you know, vacant lot, cultivation and things like that. So they're actually might be some things there. But I would say inclusion and the fact that people really need to see themselves in the work and to be reflected in the leadership and the idea of in that era, it was the Progressive Era. So you had all the scientific knowledge that was being produced through the land grant system and it was kind of like, you know, this top-down knowledge messaging, right? Where is? I think that a modern movement really needs to encourage support more and honor the many differences that people bring to gardening and food culture, and the idea now that we could use storytelling and social media to share knowledge and culture in different ways. I mean, social media is really different. I used it in my early work as Michelle knows well as a persona called the victory grower, and I was I was very an early adopter of social media platforms to get my work across and I I transitioned from victory grower to the UC food observer through the Office of the President at the University of California. But I would tell a different story now, and I would also explore, you know, every book you have limited time that you can spend on it and limited pages right and limited focus. I would focus more on race. And I so those are the things that I would focus on. One of the things I would love to have people look at the book is that there's very important information in the book about propaganda. There's a whole chapter about propaganda and how that was used during World War One, right? Through poster art and most of us don't have an objection to the idea of propaganda being used for gardening, right. And I would also say too, that in World War One, the gardening message was actually pretty inclusive. I mean, the posters were made available, in you know, lots of different languages so that they could reach immigrants. But maybe we ought to look at even what we might consider good propaganda, right, and I would not call them victory gardens now, right? I mean, there's, there's that's a term that is based in a war ethos and it's not culturally appropriate with a lot of people in this country, you know, like my dad had a victory garden in Terrell, TX during World War Two when he was a kid and he remembers it. But you know, my dad's gone now and you know, a lot of those people that had that direct sort of cultural experience with World War 2 victory gardens. A lot of those people have passed on. So what? What can we do? This more inclusive and what can we all do. And can our government do to really make gardening affordable, accessible, supported, encouraged.. Right?

00:17:08 Rick

Yeah. Well, OK, it sounds like a sequel is should, should be happening.

00:17:18 Michelle

So in a lot of your writings and things, and even just talking now, to summarize, it seems like the historical documents, like when we look at the language, the images that they tell us a lot about the values and goals and impacts, right? Like that we're underlying it. And so we've started talking about some of that with the victory gardens and the school Garden army. But I'm thinking like, as a historian looking at our current moment that we're in. How would you characterize our trends and gardens at home and community and schools?

00:18:00 Rose Hayden-Smith

How would I characterize it? Well, I think it's a lot of different things. When the pandemic started, my e-mail blew up, and my phone rang off the hook, right? Because people were at home and there was so much interest, you know, a resurgence of interest in gardening. And I think, you know, we've had lots of these sort of ebbs and flows in terms of, you know, gardening and adoption and popularity and I think I would characterize right now as uneven right that in some places it's going strong and in other places it needs supports and I think that the interest is there. And I also think too, one of the trends that I see that I celebrate is the wide availability of really good information about gardening, right there were there were periods of time when you know, your primary source was the land grant institution, right? And I still one of the first things I tell people to do is go to your county Master Gardener website because so many excellent resources and you know, amazing program. But information now it's you know, so much great information available on social media and also this trend to sort of video availability about how to garden, you know, on YouTube, on Instagram and things like that. And I look at my say, my Instagram feed and it's like a really wonderful happy mix of you know, garden tutorials from people I've never met that are wonderful.

00:20:10 Michelle

And thinking about that too, and just like characterizing current trends, one of the things we're really seeing as well is particularly since COVID is the social emotional learning, the emotional mental health and Wellness of human, and particularly youth and the interest that educators and communities have in tapping into school gardens and home gardens to improve that.

00:20:36 Rose Hayden-Smith

I think it is a wonderful strategy and I, you know, I live, you know, I'm part of a family that we're plant lovers and I'm sitting out here right now looking at, you know, bees going through my lavender and. And I know that the young people that I know that use growing things as a form of sort of therapy and making sense of a really complex, challenging and difficult world. And again, I would like to see a more explicit move by institutions, government institutions.  To really move forward movement and really help people coalesce around a sort of growing movement in a way that people can see themselves in it and that is adaptable to people and provides resources for people to do this activity, whether they live in a really dense urban area or whether they live in a rural area. And I think that, you know, educators are among our best allies in gardening work, and I just remember the value of school gardens when I did a school garden program as a volunteer for my daughter's school beginning in kindergarten all the way up till 5th grade and then I even did a program at my daughters middle school.  And I still have these kids who are now adults with kids of their own, when I see them in the community, they will come up to me and say you have no idea what a positive experience it was for me and for many. They tell me it influenced their diet. Right? In really positive ways. And just what a sort of love, a lifelong love they have of plants and gardening because of that. And so I think it's really worthwhile work.

00:23:11 Michelle

Thank you so much for influencing my life, but I also want to hear from you. Like, what are your suggestions for other folks who want to get involved in gardening and food systems?

00:23:21 Rose Hayden-Smith

OK. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for that. I'm giving you like a big heart sign with my hands. Thank you. And I would also say I don't think we're thinking big enough. And I want us to think bigger. Right. But suggestions, you know, I would, I think one of the best resources is the local master gardener program, and each state has a master gardener program. They have a, you know, and they have local components with great websites, free resources. And they're often volunteers that you can connect with and for school garden work. The Master Gardeners have been incredible. All across the United States to support that kind of work. I also find, too, that the companies that sell seeds, plants and gardening supplies often have great information on their websites. I learn about different plants every year just by reading my gardening catalogs. If you have children, plant something that germinates quickly, like maybe for carrots. And I think for kids visit the Texas A&M junior Master Gardener website connect with them on the Facebook page. They have incredible science based activities using materials that people will have at home it's a 4H program that emphasizes experiential learning. They have great videos, great videos.

00:24:57 Rick

How funny! We just interviewed our last episode was Randy Seagraves from Texas A&M. So yeah, so everybody listen to that episode for more. And that's perfect segue into that.

00:25:07 Rose Hayden-Smith

Randy Seagraves. Yeah. And so Randy and Lisa have been partners and supported my work for decades and I think so highly of their work, that curriculum, which is many curricula now. And the resources they make available, they have an absolute fire and passion and love for this work. I also want to tell people you don't need to buy fancy equipment and families that might want be looking at related activities like meal planning, cooking, what to do with produce, physical activity, gardening. The USDA is the gold standard resource. There are all sorts of tools, apps, quizzes, even my plate is now an Alexis skill. And so I would really encourage people to connect and use those resources as well.

00:26:20 Rick

That that's so weird. You just said an “Alexa skill.” I didn't know that's part of our vernacular now, that's an Alexa skill. Now interesting.

00:26:31 Rose Hayden-Smith

I know, I know.

00:26:34 Rick

OK, maybe our podcast will be an Alexa skill someday.

00:26:38 Michelle. 

Let's make it one!

00:26:41 Rose Hayden-Smith

Well, I do want to say really quickly that gardening, you know, if you're concerned about food security and food supply, gardening is good. If you want variety in your diet, gardening is good. If you're looking for something restorative and a way to be physically active gardening is good. It's earth friendly. It connects people with nature. It's a great family activity. It's a great way to enhance home learning with children. It feels as if it's something that we can take positive action on in a world that often feels as things are beyond our control. It's a way to acquire new skills and it's just one of the best things that I do in my life.

00:27:28 Michelle

Ohh thank you. 

00:27:30 Rick

I love that I could take that little bit of a recording that you said and play it every night before I go to bed. It's what we're all about, yeah.

00:27:38 Rose Hayden-Smith

OK, do that. It would be an Alexa skill.

00:27:42 Michelle

Thank you, Rose. Thank you and…

00:27:43 Rose Hayden-Smith

Thank you.

00:27:44 Rick

Thank you so much.

00:27:46 Rose Hayden-Smith

Talk to you soon.

00:27:47 Michelle

Farm to school was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn, and was made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:27:57 Rick

The content and ideas on farm to school podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, and the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:28:16 Michelle

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episodes, show notes, and get in contact with us by searching farm to school podcast, OSU.

00:28:24 Rick

We would love to hear from you. Stop by that website Michelle just mentioned to say hello or give us an idea for a future podcast.

00:28:32 Michelle

Great. Thanks again Rose for joining us.

00:28:34 Rick

Thanks, Rose.

00:28:34 Michelle

Talk to you soon.

00:28:35 Rose Hayden-Smith

Thank you. Bye, bye bye everyone.