Guerilla Gardening: resistance is fertile

The other day, Le Fox and I made our way down to Manchester's Urbis to check out their new exhibition on Manga. Having seen the exhibition (which to be honest seemed to be aimed mostly at the emo-kids in the Cathedral gardens outise), we wandered upstairs to kill a little more time. To my pleasant surprise they had an exhibition about Urban Gardening. It seems that I was not alone in my desire for the greening of Manchester's city centre - there were a great many tips for what to grow in confined balconies and window boxes. (No doubt the whole exhibition was a passionate response to Sociomath's Urban Orchards post.) What intrigued me most, however, was a small corner of the exhibition devoted to so called Guerilla Gardening. It seems as though people as despserate for green space as me had decided upon a more pro-active strategy than posting rants on a blog. They instead congregate on what is considered by them to be wasteland and plant trees, herbs, vegetables and flowers in an effort to foster a greater sense of well-being and civic pride among local residents. A couple of years ago, the hallowed airtime of the Beeb itself devoted a moment or two to the notion of guerilla gardening and in particular it's London posterboy, Richard Reynolds: a 30 year old, MG-driving, road-bike riding, well spoken former advertising executive. Have a look at a slightly tongue in cheek seven minute documentary below about guerilla gardening in London.

As for the history of Guerilla gardeining, Wikipedia claims that it started with the True Levellers or Diggers as they became known. These were folk who started gardening on common land and living in cooperatives in the second half of the 17th century. I'd argue that perhaps, since these people were growing food on land that would otherwise have been used to graze cattle that they don't really embody the "pleasant mischeif" mindset of the modern Guerilla gardener. It seems that it all really started (as most vaguely radical movements) in New York in the 1970's with the Green Guerilla group transforming a private derelict lot into a garden. One of the parts of the exhibition which really caught my attention was the concept of 'seed-bombing'. The idea is to be able to plant seeds in relatively inacessible places (behind fences/barbed wire etc). Rather than trying to bypass obstacles, such areas are 'bombed' with lumps of mud and compost containing seeds. By the next year, voila: flowers aplenty! Have a look at this video of some seedbombers in Chicago.

I'm told that there are such orgainisations in Manchester. I know nothing about them. Some links:

• Richard Reynolds' blog
• Wikipedia's Guerilla Gardening Page
• Urbis' Urban gardening exhibition