Guerilla Gardening

The Huffington Post called it, "the most adorable form of vandalistic rebellion ever.” No matter what you call it, the work of guerrilla gardeners just might be popping up in a street median near you. Guerrilla gardening is the process of transforming public, abandoned or otherwise underproductive plots of ground into edible gardens. Sometimes it’s the result of garden lovers finding themselves without yards of their own. Sometimes it’s an act of public service meant to beautify space while creating healthy, local food for those who need it. Most practitioners, however, consider their guerilla gardens a form of direct action. As opposed to other forms of political intervention – letter writing, protesting, etc – guerrilla gardening is much more than a symbolic gesture. Those participating in the act are not asking the city government to invest in local agriculture, they are growing local agriculture in the act itself.

I don’t mean to imply that all guerilla gardeners carry a confrontational approach to their hobby. In fact, it doesn’t have to be illegal: many people ask permission before they turn up soil situated on someone else’s property. Frequently, churches and other quasi-public institutions are happy to have someone volunteer their time to turn a lawn into a productive, aesthetically pleasing provider of food. It’s a no brainer, after all, that people tend to like gardens. The volunteer nature of guerrilla gardening, furthermore, fosters a sense of community and service. It’s hard to think of something more wholesome and goodhearted than neighbors getting together to turn a patch of weeds into something lovely and useful.

However, some gardeners do emphasize the political nature of the act. After all, even here in The Republic of Boulder (baaa!) the wait lists for community gardens are prohibitively long. Brian and I got rejected for a plot and if we weren’t able to spend hundreds of dollars on container materials we’d be out of gardening luck. As a result, many people feel that it is a civil responsibility to see that neighborhood and city space is put to good use. When so much land is dedicated to green deserts (read: pesticide-maintained lawns), industrial pursuits and roads, people have a right to some small portion of space for food-production purposes, no? Of course, we’ve heard appropriation defended on similar grounds of “public domain” before. If someone put an oil rig in my backyard (I’m looking at you, Garfield Country) and said it was the best way to ensure productive use of the land, I might have to plug that rig with a carrot (that is how you disable oil production, right?).

Once again, the (in?)justice behind guerilla gardening comes down to that fundamental question: Who owns the land? Who gets to decide what our neighborhoods and cities look like? Who gets to deny or permit access to productive land? Who gets to determine the nature of “productive”? While gardeners exclaim, “We do!” the victims of guerilla gardening – poor souls inflicted with vegetable gardens where their precious patch of weeds once flourished – are fighting back.

Last year in Boulder, one man was threatened with a $2,000 fine PER DAY for planting a vegetable garden in the right-of-way between his property and a public street. The threat came after a neighbor complained about the nuisance. Check out the Daily Camera article about the gardening ordeal at: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/10/boulder-man-faces-20.html

Speaking of guerrilla gardening, Brian and I gave it our first shot about three weeks ago. Behind our unit (the spot you see when you lean over the South side of the deck, and pictured below), there was a wonderfully sunny, horribly weedy patch just writhing for a bit of care and attention. We knew that turning this patch into a garden was a risk: at any time the HOA could demolish our hard work because we don’t own the land. However, we decided to give it a try. We wanted to feel our shovels dig into actual ground. We thought – once the garden starts producing – it would be a wonderful way to connect and share with our neighbors, who are encouraged to share the fruits of our labor. Our efforts have so far surpassed our expectations. We went about 8 months hardly meeting a neighbor and in one day we made friends with many of them! In the few hours we spent turning the soil, every neighbor that passed expressed enthusiasm and support for the project. Was the act vandalistic? I’m not sure, but it definitely was adorable!

To learn more about guerilla gardening, check out these resources:
- Google Image search for “Guerilla Gardening”: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&q=guerilla%20gardens&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
- Guerillagardening.org
- The Huffington Post article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/26/illegal-guerrilla-gardeni_n_179404.html