According to Wikipedia, “Guerrilla gardening is gardening on another person’s land without permission”. The term was coined in 1973 by the Green Guerilla group that was active in the Bowery Houston area of New York. The act itself, however, dates back to at least 1649 when Gerrard Winstanley and his group of Protestant agrarian communists called “the Diggers” was active in Surrey, England. The land that is guerrilla gardened (or bewildered as Australian gardener Bob Crombie likes to call it) is usually abandoned or neglected by its legal owner and the guerrilla gardeners take it over (“squat”) to grow plants. This gesture may or may not have a political flavor to it. In our case it doesn’t, at least not consciously.
While the city we live in does not have a big lack of green spaces, there are numerous neglected sidewalks and even some dying spots in parks. Seeing these spaces like that everyday for some years now made us realize that the city’s authorities probably don’t have it in their immediate plans to do something about them. So, after postponing it for quite some time, we got ourselves a spade, a pair of garden gloves, a sturdy flower (the Daisy family has some pretty robust members) and a bottle of water and set off.
The daisy and the rest of our equipment in the background.
We looked for a patch with soft ground soil in which we could dig with our limited arsenal (i.e. the spade). Luckily, it recently rained heavily here so that wasn’t a big problem. We settled for the spot in the picture below which is near a suburban bus station and has only some wild weeds growing in it. Other similar patches near it had some small trees growing in them, but this one has been empty for at least a year now.
After testing the soil and seeing that it was pretty soft, we started digging. It went smoothly, apart from some glass shards and two small rocks we didn’t face any real opposition. When the hole was deep enough, we depotted the daisy and carefully placed it in the hole.
We used the soil we had dug up to fill the hole and stomped it firm. After cleaning up the remaining soil, we watered our little daisy and set off. And that was pretty much it. It didn’t take us more than 15 minutes to make this spot a tiny bit prettier. Taking into consideration that this was our first attempt, it went pretty well. We are planning to make a lot more organized excursions in the near future with more plants, tools and friends!
A great site where you can find some general information and tips concerning guerilla gardening is guerillagardening.org.
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