I've never been to the Kew Gardens (they are in London) but that doesn't stop me reading books about the place. I imagine it must be a big deal, like a combination of the Auckland Botanic Gardens and the Wintergardens except with Royal British approval. The RHS is the Royal Horticultural Society and, like the Geographic Society it has some serious cachet in the scientific/botanical world. Because it was by Royal decree that plant hunters were sent out all over the British Empire, to obtain plants they could grow, exploit and make money from, and looking at the history of it some of it was not pretty. The Royal appetite for sugar, for example, led to lands being invaded and colonised in the tropics and people enslaved to grow cut and process sugar cane. I am sure India was ruled by the Brits simply because they wanted to control the tea trade.
But in this novel which I picked up in the library, Kew Gardens Girls at War, none of that is alluded to. It's simply a feel good chick lit focused on the love and lives of three women who apply to be gardeners to help out with the British war effort. They get assigned to make a 'dig for victory' allotment garden and grow their own veg, though in the novel vegetables are hardly mentioned when there's all this drama going on - a husband away enlisting to fight, a surprise pregnancy, a cross-cultural romance, an nurse who wants to be a doctor but her daddy won't let her or see her Jamaican beau, and an accident prone farmer who discovers medicinal plants might help the war effort. It's a nice rainy day read if you want a bit of drama with your cup of tea, Posy Lovell (a pseudonym) knows how to spin a yarn. It's not much practical use though. There aren't any recipes, and there's no mention of starvation and rations during the war.
Growing vegetables in Kew Gardens would be a piece of cake anyway, much like Michelle Obama ripping up the White House lawn for her kitchen garden. The reality would have been most Londoners would not have even had access to any land or allotment and would either be on a very long waiting list or find the soil so polluted and infertile it would have been unusable. Since when were there any sunny backyards in the city of London anyway? Or when would the councils have let citizens turn any empty land into garden - if you can't grow anything on a road side berm in Auckland how would Londonites, who don't even have berms, been able to grow anything? Especially when the city was being bombed.
I am willing to suspend my disbelief when I read stories like these though, because I am a sucker for a happy ending. I thought the title was a misnomer though, the girls were clearly young women, they didn't have to go to school, and since all the men had gone to war they were around twiddling their thumbs looking for something to do. One of the 'girls' was only picked because she was photogenic and looked good on the newsreel when they did a propaganda piece on it. I already know that ads featuring young women as gardeners do not feature real gardeners getting their hands dirty, but models wearing clothes that are too pretty to get muddy and they all wear high heels and lipstick made from fish scales. Vogue's idea of a garden girl is someone who is dressed in florals.
I think I could easily write a NZ gardening drama as I had plenty of those at the Waitakere Gardens where the 'old girls' would fight over who could grow what around the village, Johanna could have a starring role as she-who-knows-everything, and my former Boss could be the villain of the piece with his wage slave workers who garden under duress while the life veteran residents look down from their balconies, putting their feet up and happy they don't have to bend down to garden anymore.
