Review: Guerrilla Gardening

Good old Santa. He brought me a pile of books about gardening and ecology. Actually, I drove one of his "little helpers" to Liverpool, led him into my favourite radical bookshop, pointed him to the ecology shelves and said "Anything from that section". You see, receiving crap gifts is wasteful to the environment, and you know how I hate waste, so I prefer to leave nothing to chance.

The first book I read from the pile was "Guerrilla Gardening" by David Tracey. It's about how to garden on land that isn't yours. How to beautify those horrid patches of wasteland that attract litter and junkies and illegally-dumped household items. You might throw a seed grenade over a wall, you might tie containers filled with growing salad greens to a chain link fence, or drop a few runner bean seeds at the foot of every utility pole, or even break through the tarmac with a road drill and plant a tree.

I thought this would be a good book just from the title, but it turned out to be even better than I expected. Tracey really is focused on beautifying the neighbourhood and giving it back to the neighbours. He's not just out to "stick it to the Man". So there are sections on how to get permission from the landowner, and how to get support and maybe even funding from City Hall, as well as advice on when it is better to seek forgiveness than permission. There are ideas for long-term projects where a group of people plant a garden and tend it regularly, as well as "hit and run" projects like the seed grenade idea. I really loved the idea of cutting a slogan out of a bedsheet, then using the bedsheet as a stencil by spreading it over a lawn in front of e.g. some corporate offices, and sprinkling organic fertiliser over the gaps. Over time the grass should grow thicker and greener in those areas and spell out your message in an environmentally-friendly but hard-to erase way.

The book is written with a light touch, filled with witty jokes and short quotes. I often paused to read a little bit out to Ed or my dad because I thought they'd smile. Things like "Resistance is Fertile" (slogan on a protest placard), "Please sit on the grass" (sign on a guerrilla-planted lawn), and "Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks" (quote attributed to Ian Hamilton Finlay). But it's no coffee-table book, filled with sound-bites and devoid of content. It's a practical how-to book which tells you the best way to plant a tree as well as suggesting some helpful things to say if you get stopped by the police. But primarily it's an inspiring book. I'm very keen to give some of these ideas a try, and I've signed up with Guerrilla Gardening.org to try to make contact with like-minded people in my area.