I’ve been surveying the beautifully manicured lawns of the college quads this early spring and thinking to myself: vegetables.

When I explain to visiting American students that they cannot repose on these acres of grass they are bemused to find that we have such beautiful but wasted spaces at the heart of our city. Perhaps the time has come for us to get our hands dirty, ‘Dig for Victory’ again, and liberate Oxford’s academic lawns.

I have heard that many of the city’s ornamental gardens were used for food production during the Second World War. For example, in 1941, Lord Elton, the Trust Secretary of Rhodes House, suggested, “as there is no petrol for the lawn mowers, the lawns and borders should be dug up to grow vegetables”, although, “I do not believe it would be worth digging up the Warden’s rose garden as the soil is very poor”.

In due course a gardener called Griffin was installed, who “does his best, but it is not a very impressive best”. After the war, it was observed, “vegetable production has been poor and not worth the effort put in, with wireworms in the potatoes, and caterpillars eating the cabbages”.

By 1948 the lawns were resown, although apparently cabbages kept appearing for some time afterwards. Perhaps a more gifted gardener could have made it work for good.

While I was studying for my PhD in Dublin, I spent one glorious summer at the stately Glencairn House, near Leopardstown. The British Ambassador was away and his son, an old friend, had invited me around for a game of croquet. I found it very difficult to return to my bedsit lined with Wallace Stevens criticism and Heidegger lectures, so I stayed, and was delighted to discover that our lunches were to be prepared for us from produce grown in the walled gardens.

My friend’s father is now President of one of the Oxford colleges and I wonder if it’s ever occurred to him to live so thriftily again.

More locally, Hogacre Common, the ‘eco park’ established on an old college sports ground in South Oxford, might inspire various provosts, deans and masters to make their domains into self-sufficient smallholdings of academic goodness.

Mindful of the decline in our farming industry since the 18th century, sometimes I dream of obtaining a dilapidated mansion and farm in Wales or an old villa and vineyard in the Langhe, and establishing my own university. The curriculum would be primarily ancient writings, Italian and English literature, and husbandry.

Why shouldn’t students learn to make cheese between seminars on Virgil’s Georgics and Cowper’s The Task?

In 1873 John Ruskin had the idea of using the brawn of Oxford undergraduates when he convinced a few of them to help build up the road from North Hinksey to South Hinksey.

After he made the mistake of choosing Oscar Wilde to be part of the team, Ruskin went off to Assisi, and left them to it. Inevitably the road was never finished.

But it makes me wonder about the untold benefits of students and academics tilling Oxford’s beautiful wastelands.