Prime Minister Mackenzie King Visits with Mrs. Andrew Carnegie at her mansion on 90th Street

From the Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King
New York City, May 31, 1943

At 4PM, called on Mrs. Andrew Carnegie. [Wife of the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist.]

She gave me a warm welcome. She was anxious to show me her Victory Garden. We went out together to the little enclosure which lies between 90th Street and her beautiful residence.

I gave her my arm and we walked together around the green path of lawn around a vegetable garden which was where the lawn had formerly been.

I’ve been heartened by the millions of new British growers who have sprung up this year – almost three million, according to research from The Horticultural Trades Association (HTA). Nearly half of these new gardeners are aged under 45.

By Craig Sams
Horticulture Weekl
25 November 2020

Excerpt:

Not only does the gardening industry have more customers, but growers as a whole are spending more as they stock up their horticultural armoury.

The HTA Garden Retail Monitor found that sales of gardening products were up 34%, 17% and 19% in June, July and August respectively in UK garden centres, compared to the same time last year. On average, individual customers were spending 35% more on gardening products.

Sales also surged in bedding plants (29%), seeds (59%) and gardening equipment (51%), while garden leisure categories were higher than in August 2019.

“They would take much of their food off the land in terms of hunting and their kitchen garden if they could. And, of course, like white settlers, they would preserve food for the winter. They would can their peas and preserve their vegetables and have root cellars, and so on.”

By Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
National Observer
November 25th 2020

Excerpt:

“There was an agriculture here that wasn’t immediately recognizable to Europeans,” he explained. For instance, Coast Salish people on the province’s south coast used controlled burns to maintain camas and wild potato plantations, but these well-tended clearings weren’t recognized by early Europeans as cultivated fields. As more Europeans arrived in present-day B.C., those practices started adapting to a new import: potatoes.

The potato trade wasn’t limited to the north coast. Lutz said communities from southern Vancouver Island to Alaska picked up the potato trade and usually grew them in fertile and moist pockets of land scattered across their territories.