guerrilla gardening

A topic that’s mak­ing its rounds these days is the prac­tice of guer­rilla gardening.

It can take dif­fer­ent forms, but what’s being talked about most are “seed bomb­ing” and stealth­ily tak­ing over neglected pub­lic spaces.

Richard Reynolds in Lon­don has just released a book, On Guer­rilla Gar­den­ing, and that’s caus­ing a lot of the buzz. The hiply “crim­i­nal” nature of what he’s doing has given Reynolds a cer­tain aura. Even Adi­das is try­ing to tap into it with a pro­posal for an adver­tis­ing cam­paign. Think of the “edgy” caché that Shep­ard Fairey devel­oped with his “Obey” cam­paign of guerrilla-applied posters fea­tur­ing Andre the Giant. In addi­tion to now doing sig­nage for the Obama cam­paign, Fairey has taken that celebrity and chan­neled into an art and mar­ket­ing career. Reynolds is poised to do some­thing similar.

In addi­tion to Lon­don the prac­tice is hap­pen­ing all over: Berlin, New York, Long Beach in California–lots of places. In Long Beach, for instance, some­one recently named in an arti­cle only as “Scott” has been beau­ti­fy­ing neglected traf­fic medi­ans by plant­ing them with attrac­tive land­scap­ing. What’s really to his credit is that he weeds and oth­er­wise main­tains the spaces, and he’s been doing this for ten years, more than twice as long as Reynolds.

In the same arti­cle, Ramon Arevalo, Super­in­ten­dent of Grounds Main­te­nance for Long Beach, has said that he has no prob­lem with “Scott’s” ille­gal activ­ity. “If you want to do this, my advice is to con­tact myself or the coun­cil per­son. We want to part­ner with peo­ple who care about where they live.”

That sounds like the seed bomb for a whole new pro­gram cities could develop. Why not part­ner peo­ple who want to grow liv­ing things with gov­ern­ments in pos­ses­sion of butt-ugly patches of untended land?

Here in San Diego there are sev­eral beau­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­grams in and around the city where artists are invited to dec­o­rate the mun­dane elec­tri­cal uti­til­ity boxes that pop­u­late street cor­ners and front yards. Hun­dreds of boxes have sported inter­est­ing new paintjobs as a result. Why not do some­thing sim­i­lar with those dead zones spread through­out most cities by get­ting peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in beau­ti­fy­ing their sur­round­ings by plant­ing gar­dens in neglected spaces?

And–here’s a rad­i­cal idea–why not pay them some­thing to do it?!

June 17 2008 05:33 am | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: •

3 Responses to “guerrilla gardening”

  1. Amy on 18 Jun 2008 at 4:44 pm #

    I think that the best over all approach would be to get a group together, and find sup­port in the city gov­ern­ment in which you live. Even more than just Robin Hood-ing plants into median strips, I think that a rec­og­nized beau­ti­fi­ca­tion group can have great long term effects on a city — and the ini­tia­tives taken on by the gov­ern­ment at a later date.

  2. Greg on 19 Jun 2008 at 6:13 pm #

    In the town I lived in last year, there was an orga­ni­za­tion in which gar­den­ers adopted traf­fic medi­ans and other pub­lic spaces for full-on gar­den­ing, as well as pro­vid­ing trash bins at town beaches. It has made the town so lovely…they are spon­sored entirely through dona­tions, though largely began as a vol­un­teer movement.

  3. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » halloween frights on 31 Oct 2008 at 4:14 am #

    […] so many bet­ter ways to save water and enhance the world you live in. Greg sug­gested that some­one seed­bomb this house in a bit of guer­rilla gar­den­ing, but how do you […]

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