The dream garden

Birmingham Mail 2 April 1941.

This article reports that Birchfield Public Library in Perry Barr hosted a Royal Horticultural Society exhibition accompanying the publication of their photographic instructional guide, The Vegetable Garden Displayed, which provided clear information on how to grow vegetables in either a private garden or on an allotment. The exhibition was arranged to further the “Dig for Victory” campaign. Three impressions were printed in its first year and 75,000 copies were sold. The Vegetable Garden Displayed was reported to be the best-selling Royal Horticultural Society book ever by the end of the 1940s.

Transcription:

The ‘Dream Garden’
Exhibition Photos in Birmingham

Few things in life are more inspiring than a well-kept garden. Men who have been growing things in their leisure for years will gaze with great admiration at 200 odd photographs of a perfect husbandman and his plot now on show at Birchfield Public Library. The photographs have been provided by the Royal Horticultural Society and the exhibition has been arranged by the Allotments Committee of the Birmingham City Council to further the "Dig for Victory" campaign.

As a visitor walks round the room he is taken; step by step, through the art of making compost heaps, to vegetable planting and tending, green manuring, successional cropping, inter-cropping and so on. The results are phenomenal. This man's plants are giants. He has about 100 large sprouts, for example, on a single stalk. His peas, his runner beans, reach great heights, but they are not the peas and the runner beans one sees on the average allotment in a city like Birmingham - though Birmingham is a city of many, and good, allotments.

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