The secret life of guerrilla gardeners | Environment | The Guardian - Annotated

• Around the world, a shadowy army of plant lovers is on a mission: to make their dull, grey neighbourhoods more beautiful places to live. Armed with seedbombs and spades, these green-fingered outlaws are stealthily filling neglected public land with flowers and shrubs.
• Richard Reynolds
• • Friday April 25 2008
  • Article history
• The Guardian,

• If you want to be a gardener, then you must do so in your own garden or else obtain permission to garden someone else’s land.

  But some people have a different definition of gardening. I am one of them. I do not wait for permission to become a gardener but dig wherever I see horticultural potential. I do not just tend existing gardens but create them from neglected space. I, and thousands of people like me, step out from home to garden land we do not own. We see opportunities all around us. Vacant lots flourish as urban oases, roadside verges dazzle with flowers and crops are harvested from land that was assumed to be fruitless.

• This is guerrilla gardening.
• It was in the Big Apple that the term "guerrilla gardening" was coined in 1973, by a young painter called Liz Christy. Liz noticed tomato plants growing in the mounds of trash that littered derelict lots in her neighbourhood. The plants had clearly sprouted from fruit in the discarded rubbish, and their germination promised potential in the landscape. Likewise local children were finding places to play in the urban wastelands. Taking inspiration from what they saw, Liz and her friends scattered their own seeds in vacant lots, before deciding to create a community garden. Thirty-five years on, the garden she and her friends made on the corner of Bowery and Houston streets holds a grove of weeping birch, flowering perennials, vegetables and a grape arbour.
• Extracted from On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries, by Richard Reynolds, to be published by Bloomsbury on May 5 priced £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875
• There are three key horticultural tactics you can deploy for maximum impact:
• Colour
• Incongruity
• Fragrance