Guerrilla gardening explained

David Tracey is a journalist and environmental designer whose "Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto" has just been released by New Society Publishers.

The name may invoke images of young bandana-masked cadres digging tulip trenches long after midnight, but guerrilla gardening turns out to be one of the most accessible and fastest-growing forms of our favorite recreational activity.

I thought when I started research for a book on the topic that finding renegade growers would be difficult. Wouldn't they be clandestine by definition? With their writing done in secret on the landscape itself, where would I even find a calling card? But fortunately guerrilla gardeners, whether or not they call themselves that, are everywhere, and have been for some time.

The history of the tactic is still largely unexplored. Certainly plants and politics have been linked throughout human history, so it isn't hard to imagine a few freethinkers slyly lifting some of their ancient rulers' prized seeds or berries to plant closer to home.

In modern times, the government's last push for people to expand their personal growing horizons came during World War II with the campaign for Victory Gardens. Some of the vegetable plots started alongside railroad tracks or unused street-ends are still going.

Today, there are at least two trends contributing to the rising popularity of guerrilla gardening. One is the environment. With the news seeming more dire every year, people are ahead of their politicians at both sensing the crisis and acting on it. Gardeners know how we never feel more alive and connected to things than when in the garden. The harsh realities of global warming are making us look beyond the fence to the spaces beyond that need tending, too. I suspect that's why many of the guerrilla gardeners I met wouldn't fit anyone's stereotypical definition of a plant anarchist. Along with students, laborers and activists I also interviewed professors, doctors and grandmothers.

The spreading notion that it may be OK for the public to tend the public space is behind the second trend contributing to the rise of guerrilla gardening: legitimacy. Even some government officials see the point of getting people actively involved in their growing environment. The city of Vancouver, Canada, where I live, used to browbeat growers who strayed beyond their lawns into the sidewalk strips with bylaws and fines. Then one day the penny must have dropped: hundreds of citizens want to beautify the city for free and we're trying to stop them?

Today, there's a city-sponsored program encouraging people to take over traffic calming circles and sidewalk bulges. The city saves thousands of dollars in maintenance costs, the residents begin to see the city as a garden we all tend, and guerrilla gardeners (or whatever you call them) win another silent victory for the planet.

-- David Tracey

Comments

[MB]

So what exactly is guerrilla gardening?

[SM]

It’s a new trend. Informal groups are coming together and taking over maintenance of neglected public spaces: roadsides, traffic medians, large containers located in urban thoroughfares. It’s big in the U.K.

[Carol M]

Here's a fun link of the London guerilla gardening group: http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

This group selects a neglected patch of urban earth, then coordinates a night time raid. By the following morning, the spot sports new perennials, herbs, trees or annuals.

Technically, the group is operating without the city's approval. But the group has also received a lot of positive press, and since they are improving the city, they are left alone.

[michael jones]

Very interesting! Gardening is my hobby and i think that this is the best of all leisure time activities! I have to buy some gardeing products to make my garden more beautiful!