Going WILD- Guerilla Gardening
Guerilla Gardening sounds like fun and usually takes place in the stealth of night.
Seed bombs otherwise known as ‘green grenades‘ along with midnight watering missions are a great adventure with a positive spin of community action. Seasoned and savvy guerilla gardeners know to pick hardy, drought tolerant plants that require little maintenance and have great visual impact.
Guerilla Gardening is essentially gardening on someones land without permission and is generally used as a means for people to reclaim and regenerate public spaces.
This group of people have a range of different motives. Some guerilla gardeners aim to beautify, add interest and some are motivated to produce food. Others may be solely focused on planting natives, making a statement to local council. Whatever the reason, arguing to create complexity in our public spaces, provide habitat for native birds or celebrating local plants to create a sense of place, Guerilla Gardening is happening.
Guerilla gardeners usually find neglected areas, spaces void of plants or unimaginative plantings to work their magic. Good guerilla gardening opportunites are street traffic islands, under street trees or in the ever boring biennial flower plantings.
Richard Reynolds is well-known guerilla gardener in London and has led the high-profile Elephant and Castle Guerilla gardens.
Why not throw in a bit of spinach and mix it up? Not only would it create more visual interest but also some kai for the ever hungry university student or some native plants as a food source for birds. All it takes is a good throw of a seed bomb from the bus or from your bike on the way home from work or school- easy as.
While guerilla gardening is a great concept with lots happening in Europe, it has been slow to take off in New Zealand. Perhaps the councils are too diligent in attending and defending the annual planting of salvias in the traffic islands.
Sounds like fun! I think that in Dunedin, guerilla style weeding with saws and poison (targetted at sycamores, flowering currant, darwin’s barberry and other exotic beauties) would have higher priority than unauthorized plantings…
Woosers the saws and poison sound Full On, but I like the idea. Guerilla weeding would be great here in New Zealand as invasive species are very problematic.