I first came across the phrase “guerrilla gardening” while trawling through the thousands of gardening-related websites available to be Googled. Now Richard Reynolds, initiator of http://www.guerrillagardening.org has written a book On guerrilla gardening: a handbook for gardening without boundaries.
Reynolds defines guerrilla gardening as “the illicit cultivation of someone else’s land”. Guerrilla gardeners see a waste patch of ground – an empty building site, for example – and plant it with flowers or crops. Often this activity is undertaken in the dead of night, on “raids”, so as to evade the eyes of authority or the legal owners of the land.
This is not mere anarchy, however. As Renolds explains in his book, illicit gardening has a history and a philiosophy, and uses the tactics of guerrilla warfare to make our built environments more beautiful and useful spaces.
If Johnny Appleseed was one of your childhood heroes, this book will strike a chord. Visit the website too – it’s full of photos of people doing naughty things with plants on traffic islands.
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