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Guerrilla gardening
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This section may contain excessive, poor or irrelevant examples. You can improve the article by adding more descriptive text. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (August 2008) |
In Northern Utah, apple trees commonly grow along the banks of canals. Asparagus grows along the smaller ditch banks. Many of these plants were seeded 150 years ago by the workers who dug the canals, by burying their lunch apple core in the freshly dug soil or by surreptitiously spreading seeds along a new ditchbank[citation needed]. Guerrilla gardening continues today, as individuals secretly plant fruit trees, edible perennials, and flowers in parks, along bike trails, etc. Some guerrilla gardeners do so for the purpose of providing food. For example, the Tacamiche banana plantation workers in Honduras illegally grew vegetables on the abandoned plantation land, rather than leave with the plantation's closure in 1995.[citation needed]
One high-profile example of guerrilla gardening took place in May 1996, when about 500 activists affiliated with The Land is Ours, including the journalist George Monbiot, occupied 13 acres (53,000 m2) of derelict land belonging to the Guinness company on the banks of the River Thames in Wandsworth, South London. Their action aimed to highlight what they described as "the appalling misuse of urban land, the lack of provision of affordable housing and the deterioration of the urban environment."[citation needed]
A community grew up on the site called "Pure Genius!!" (named after the Guinness advertising slogan). They lived there for five and a half months before being evicted.[4]
Later, on 1 July 1996, Have p en nat ("Garden in a night") was made by the Danish kologiske Igangsttere ("Organic starters").
An empty piece of land in the middle of the city at Guldbergsgade in Nrrebro, Copenhagen, Denmark, was transformed into a garden in a single night. About 1000 people took part in the project.[citation needed]
On May Day 2000, Reclaim the Streets organised a mass guerrilla gardening action in Parliament Square, London. After a carnivalesque procession with a samba band and a Critical Mass bike ride from Hyde Park, thousands of guerrilla gardeners occupied the square and planted vegetables and flowers. A maypole was erected, around which many of the gardeners danced. Banners hung in the square reading "Resistance is Fertile" (a pun on futile), "Let London Sprout", "Capitalism is Pants", and "The Earth is a Common Treasury for All", the latter being a quote from the seventeenth-century Digger Gerrard Winstanley. An Indymedia public access terminal was set up in the new allotment, and the statue of Winston Churchill was given a green turf mohican. The perpetrator (an ex-British soldier) was fined for his vandalism of the Churchill statue.[5]
In 2007 guerrilla gardeners in Brussels, known as The Brussels Farmers [2], declared 1 May International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day. This is a day in which guerrilla gardeners around the world plant sunflower seeds in public places within their neighborhood (in practice this event is limited to regions of the northern hemisphere where the climate and season are most appropriate). Participants in that first year included Brussels, London and Bordeaux. Every year since then the occasion has gained momentum and been promoted through the GuerrillaGardening.org network [3] and in 2010 more than 5000 signed up to take part. [4]
Leaf Street is an acre of land in Hulme, Manchester, England, that was once an urban street until turfed over by Manchester City Council. Local people, facilitated by Manchester Permaculture Group, took direct action in turning the site into a thriving community garden.[5]
The South African shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo has planted gardens in a number of their affiliated settlements, such as the Kennedy Road settlement.
GuerrillaGardening.org[6] was created in October 2004 by Richard Reynolds as a blog of his solo guerrilla gardening outside Perronet House, a neglected council block in London's Elephant and Castle district. At the time, his motivations were simply those of a frustrated gardener looking to beautify the neighborhood, but his website attracted the interest of fellow guerrilla gardeners in London and beyond, as well as the world's media. Reynolds's guerrilla gardening has now reached many pockets of South London, and news of his activity has inspired people around the world to get involved. He also works alongside other troops, some local and some who travel to participate. He has also guerrilla-gardened in Libya, Berlin and Montreal. Today, GuerrillaGardening.org is still his blog but also includes tips, links and thriving community[7] boards where guerrilla gardeners from around the world are finding supportive locals. His book, On Guerrilla Gardening[8], which describes and discusses activity in 30 different countries, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK and USA in May 2008.–Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto– by David Tracey has accounts of community garden leaders and public officials. –Guerrilla Gardening: How to Create Gorgeous Gardens for Free– by Barbara Pallenberg is a how-to on gardening that was "everything you wanted to know about gardening but were afraid to ask" (http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Gardening-Create-Gorgeous-Gardens/product-reviews/1580631835/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1).
Early on Saturday, April 26, a team of volunteers installed forty-nine small birdhouses along the entire length of Hanover Avenue in the Fan District of Richmond, Virginia. They were built from untreated lumber and were specifically sized to provide a safe haven for some of Richmond's local songbirds, including wrens, blue birds, and finches, from the unwelcome non-native species such as the Starling and the European Barn Swallow.
The installation was inspired by a combination of several local developments.
Additionally, the guerrilla gardening movement has been catching on in Richmond, Virginia. In 2006, Style Weekly reported an act of guerrilla gardening in an alley off Hanover Avenue adjacent to the new birdhouses.[9] Also, a group called Tricycle Gardens has begun the reclamation of blighted urban spaces in some of Richmond's poorest neighborhoods.[10] Their efforts are bringing locally grown food and a better understanding of the interconnectedness humans have with nature to the city.
The volunteers who installed the birdhouses have asked members of the community to tend the houses in the fall once the breeding season is complete. The houses have been designed with a hinged right panel for easy cleaning.
In July 2009 land rights activists moved on to a derelict piece of land near Kew Gardens in West London. Kew Bridge Eco Village is a small community of squatters who have grown vegetables and built basic wooden dwellings on the land.
Guerrilla gardening is prominent in Melbourne where most of the inner northern suburbs have community vegetable gardens; land adjoining rail lines has undergone regeneration of the native vegetation, including nature strips. There are a few minor disputes between guerrilla gardeners in Melbourne, with most falling into one of two groups: those concerned most with native planting and those concerned most with communal food growing. However, people with differing opinions still work together without dispute.[11]
There is a small community group in Melbourne called "Permablitz" who gather regularly to design and construct suburban vegetable gardens for free, in an effort to educate residents in Melbourne on how to grow their own food and better prepare them if/when food prices become too expensive.
Australian Network 10's show Guerrilla Gardeners featured a team of gardeners who make over areas of council owned property without them knowing.
Guerrilla gardeners are a diverse group of people who have different goals, values and methods of gardening on public land.
Some individuals and small groups have marijuana gardens hidden in national forests and blended in with cornfields. There are many marijuana-growing websites that give tips and experiences regarding how to secure your cannabis guerrilla garden from law enforcement and rogue harvesters. Internet forums are the primary source of information because they offer the participants a way to discuss their practice with anonymity. They are primarily concerned about keeping their plots hidden and not leaving trails. People engage in this type of guerrilla gardening for personal gain instead of for any political, environmental or beautification reasons. Because of the economic incentives, hidden cannabis crops are not usually associated with self-proclaimed guerrilla gardeners although their tactics are similar in many ways.
Many freegans (people who reclaim food from waste bins) and urban foragers who wish to live independently from the agricultural-industrial complex have also adopted guerrilla gardening. Urban populations are completely dependent on fossil fuels to import food supplies from anywhere in the world. The average supermarket food item travels 1494 miles to reach its destination . Food made up 231.9 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2000, which amounts to everybody throwing away 4.5 pounds of food a day each day of the year[12]. Guerrilla gardening alongside with practices of urban foraging and freeganism is a way to become more sustainable and self reliant. Most freegans realize that dumpster subsidence is a way to escape monetary participation of the industrial food web but it does not offer enough to create a healthy and sustainable food system. In the event energy costs will be so high that stores will cease the ability to import refrigerated food, freegans are expanding and diversifying their practices to include much more guerrilla gardening.
There are some health risks to foraging or planting edible plants near toxic waste sites and roads with heavy traffic due to chemical runoff that gets absorbed by the roots. Toxic plants tend to grow on toxic land. Some scientists[who?] have learned that certain types of plants absorb toxins from the soil without dying and can thus be used as a mechanism to reduce chemical ground pollution. Guerrilla gardening could be used as a way to take independent action to clean up ones community but eating a toxin-absorbent plant will deposit those toxins in the body. Urban foragers face similar health risks in this manner. Care should be taken to not eat plants that grow in areas where there is known chemical contamination or water pollution. Plants that grow on the side of high-traffic roads should also not be eaten because of automobile fluid runoff.
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