Found a nice AP story by Scott Lindlaw ("Victory Gardens Revive World War II Project, With a Modern Twist"; 29 February 2008) regarding the San Francisco VG revival. It explains how an art project by University of San Francisco professor Amy Franceschini caught the attention of city leaders and turned into a community-wide project. I especially liked the part where Lindlaw described Franceschini as having "wrestled with whether she should retain the word victory, which is 'loaded with nationalism'...[deciding eventually that she] wanted to keep that word 'victory' because we are in a time of war, [but] we should change what that word means so that victory should mean self-reliance."
When I read that, I immediately thought of how, in the run up to WWII, the government decided to switch from the "war garden" terminology of the First World War to "victory gardens."
Nothin' new on earth...which is oddly reassuring.
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