What is Guerrilla Gardening?
I borrowed a book from my library recently called “On Guerrilla Gardening” by Richard Reynolds. I had no idea what I was checking out. I thought I would learn some gardening tips. As it turns out there seems to be an under world of gardeners. The more I read the more fascinated I became with these gardeners. To think that some people can not garden freely was something I was unaware of. I guess it makes sense though when you think of all the people that live in apartment buildings. Where can they plant things if they have no land? Guerrilla gardeners have taken over public spaces to satisfy their need to garden and get back in touch with nature. On page 16 Reynolds defines gorilla gardening as “The illicit cultivation of someone else’s land.” This sounds like risky business to me. Think of all the land around you. Think specifically of property that isn’t taken care of. This type of land is the land that guerrilla gardeners target. Guerrilla gardeners are fighting a war to beautify the
Guerrilla gardening is a unique type of environmental direct action that involves taking over a plot of uncultivated land and covering it in living plants such as flowers, ornamental trees, and edible plants. Guerrilla gardeners sometimes say that they are practicing “vandalism with nature,” as guerrilla gardening is technically illegal, since it is practiced on privately owned land that does not belong to the gardeners. The guerrilla gardening movement has grown across the Northern Hemisphere, with large active chapters in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. In a guerrilla gardening strike, gardeners descend upon a piece of unused land such as an empty lot, a median strip, or an abandoned yard. They plant or seed the area with a variety of sturdy plant species that can hold their own if neglected, and then move on to another “target.” Frequently, the guerrilla garden is allowed to exist peacefully, and other gardeners may stop by now and then to tend it and keeping the land
Guerrilla gardening is the art of using a piece of land which you do not own to grow something. One step removed from actual guerrilla warfare, guerrilla gardening takes land not for the people, but for nature; returning misused or disused land and finding a purpose for it. Guerrilla gardeners come late in the night with watering cans, compost and gardening gloves, and turn rotting sods of grass outside some condemned building into a vegetable patch, a clump of daffodils, or a flowering rosebush.
Should some one ask you I suggest you put in three minutes of study now by reading on, so you can reply to them with one sentence. I shall assume we all know what gardening is. The question is what makes it guerrilla gardening rather than just gardening? Last week the New York Times and The Times in Britain reported the incredible two-day turfing of London’s Trafalgar Square with 2000 metres of grass as “Guerrilla Gardening.” It looked amazing (we can debate this ecologically questionable short-term gesture another time), but was it really guerrilla gardening? It was done at night, it was incongruous, it turned a stone square into something green… but does this make it guerrilla gardening? Not to me. It was a legitimate marketing stunt, funded by the London tourist board and installed by professional gardeners – it was what is commonly called guerrilla marketing. Another new definition of guerrilla gardening popped up in a San Francisco newspaper last week. There they said it was “gard
Guerrilla gardening is the art of using a piece of land which you do not own to grow something. One step removed from actual guerrilla warfare, guerrilla gardening takes land not for the people, but for nature; returning misused or disused land and finding a purpose for it. Guerrilla gardeners come late in the night with watering cans, compost and gardening gloves, and turn rotting sods of grass outside some condemned building into a vegetable patch, a clump of daffodils, or a flowering rosebush. Why bother? Well, why not? Land is expensive, and is the only base commodity that the entire human race has to share. Without getting too deep into arguments about the politics of land ownership, land is very important. Every person surely has some right to some land of their own. But take a look around any urbanised area, and you’ll see that there is a lot of wasted land. Guerrilla gardening takes that land, and returns it to use. I’m not going to pretend that planting a geranium on a scrap o
