Boston’s Fenway Victory Gardens
Fenway Victory Gardens’ Teaching Garden is designed to help experienced and novice gardeners to better understand cultivation methods. The “Green Team” of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, above, helped construct the 17 raised plots for the Teaching Garden.
Photograph Courtesy Mike Mennonno, The Fenway Victory Gardens
Fenway—it’s more than home to the Boston Red Sox! Learn the story behind America’s oldest victory garden.
By Mary Schons
National Geographic
November 30, 2011
Excerpt:
The Fenway Victory Gardens in Boston, Massachusetts, is the oldest surviving victory garden in the United States. The Fenway gardens were established in 1942, at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Victory gardens were planted on private and public land in the U.S. during World War I and World War II to reduce pressure on the nation’s food supply during wartime. Victory gardens were sometimes called “war gardens” or “food gardens for defense.”
Fenway Victory Gardens is an enormous space, with seven acres in the heart of Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. The site is part of Back Bay Fens, the first park in Boston’s famous “Emerald Necklace” system of parks and waterways.
Back Bay Fens gets its name from the primary ecosystem of the area. A fen is a wetland fed by groundwater and drainage from surrounding soils. Because fens are fed by freshwater sources, they are not as acidic as bogs and can support a wide array of plant and animal life.
