2011 Guerrilla Gardening London Lavender

Location: Perronet House, SE1 Ginger Gardening: 1 Jan 2012 London is drenched, the gardens are replenishing their precious stores of water so gardeners here turn to other pursuits. Guests to a New Year’s Eve party came bearing a flat pack ginger bread recreation of Perronet House and the guerrilla garden around it which I started in 2004. It’s a lot more colourful than the garden at the moment, although wall flowers are already in bloom. It’s also a lot more tasty

Verbena and yellow roses outside Perronet House, London Road SE1

Location: St George’s Circus, SE1 Guerrilla Gardening: Dec 18 Years ago we planted a sad, discarded Christmas tree as the centre piece of our guerrilla garden at St George’s Circus. This is the second and longest lasting, a modest 3’ spruce who discretely hides behind more prominent bay, hollyhocks and deep drifts of plane tree leaves. But with some bright red tinsel and dried slices of orange it has it’s turn to catch a passers eye

and slow the traffic to ponder on the season, as well as who might be tending this and how it came to be. While the festive tree celebrates life in the soil a few feet away is a new grave. I

Lyla, Christina, Andy and I decorate the St George’s Circus Christmas Tree

discovered it a few weeks ago when sweeping leaves with Lake. Marking the spot was an elaborate memorial wrapped in a plastic bag. We could see a tribute to Sparky, a dead dog, plastic flowers, a blanket, a toy dog and candles. Discovering a Guerrilla Grave is a new one for me. Burying your pet in public, perhaps on one of their regular routes, is a stronger memorial than the vet’s incinerator, though scattering of a pet’s ashes might be better for the garden. At least the memorial prevents it being accidentally exhumed

Under the leaves we discovered an intricate memorial to Sparky the dog.

Location: Brandon St, SE17 Guerrilla Gardening: Nov 19 Budget: About £120 For the exhibitionist guerrilla gardener the roundabout really is the perfect canvas, to be enjoyed from every angle and tended as an island of fertility in a sea of tyres and tarmac. This one is on the edge of an almost derelict council estate (which

traffic is almost non existent, but for now it can also be enjoyed from above as the high level walkways (our own potential High Line) offer a great view. I’ve speculated about digging this one up for a while, but the impetus came from the exciting new opportunity of running a new community garden just over the road from this island. If all goes well the over grown jungle behind wooden hoardings

will in 2012 become the Mobile Gardeners Park. But the seasons don’t wait for leases and there’s gardening to be done in the neighbourhood, for which the guerrilla strategy is natural.

The four and a half hour marathon of clearing begins

Celia, Sunny, Lyla, Rachel and I began the ominous task of digging up the grass and a lot of rubble, later joined by a keen contingent of LSE Cities students and later by Heather and some beers. In went 32 lavender, a few hundred ‘Salome’ daffodils (pink head on a white plate), Orange Emperor tulips and more remnants of the Trafalgar Sq’s green wall: Thymus, Hebe topiaria Ophiopogon japonicus ‘Nana’. That will show the developers we’re serious about gardening. Now we just need serious rain.

Before, just an ordinary roundabout. As night falls we begin the planting. Day Two: Sunny planting. This is just the start

Freaky Fruit. A tomato rippens on the vine on the edge of the guerrilla lavender field in central London

And here’s a Strawberry thriving in the same patch too, despite the season.

Location: Westminster Bridge Road, London, England Guerrilla Fruiting: Sunday 13 November 2011 Amongst some of the guerrilla gardens we’ve planted in London are secreted a few edibles, snack food for when weeding and a treat for the very observant passer by or a creature who gets there first. On a crisp November Sunday I hadn’t expected to still find some treats when out planting bulbs, but we’ve had a mild autumn and the warm exhaust fumes probably help too - which all goes to suggest whether these fruit are both poisonous to eat and perhaps symbolic of our poisoned planet. But at the time I just saw food and gobbled them up anyway.

Location: My living room, Elephant & Castle Haberdashery Division: Oct through Nov ‘11 As the activity in the guerrilla gardens turns to leaf sweeping and soggy litter collection the annual frenzy builds indoors as production of our London lavender pillows continues. These are our key source of fund raising, and of course this year containlavender harvested by the Duchess of Cornwall, would you believe it. I hear she has packed one of our fragrant pillows off on the Royal tour of South Africa. While my local authority of Southwark remain tediously dismissive of guerrilla gardeners it’s nice to know the swiff of our illicit activities is being carried around by the royals... rock royalty too, as Nile Rodgers, an insomniac, also now has one about his person. These pillows are all made by volunteers from exceedingly fine cotton fabric that was due for landfill but donated by a well known British fashion house, who would rather not admit it. You can buy yours on line from the page here.

Location: Warsaw, Poland Guerrilla Gardening: Late October 2011 The Museum of Modern Art here have an annual festival “Under Construction” to which I

was invited to give a lecture. As ever when on the preaching circuit I took the chance to find out more about local guerrilla gardening, and do a little myself. I like Warsaw a lot, it’s a bit like a much larger version of Elephant & Castle where I live, with even greater potential in the landscape for gardeners. Warsaw is not a dense city, the devastation of WWII, the soviet love of parading spaces and the contemporary protected development process has ensured that. I was told there’s an casual attitude to the public realm, that it doesn’t belong to anyone rather than to the authorities, which enables an easy, relaxed attitude amongst guerrilla gardeners. I

Warsaw's plastic palm tree Jewish memorial and the municple sea of chrysanthemums

attempted to pimp her pavement with a wild flower meadow in an empty tree pit and gave me a gift of Polish wild flower seeds (please don’t shriek all you native plant obsessives, who may worry about Polish immigrants, I operate an open borders policy) . Warsaw is not a blank canvas for the guerrilla gardener. The city enthusiastically plants up beds and lots of pavement planters in autumn with chrysanthemums, their yellow and purple was ubiquitous in the centre. Over a few days I scouted suitable opportunities for a risky ‘hit and run’ dig (as in I can’t look after the garden), and settled from the scrappy fringes of the shrubbery next to the Centrum metro.

No one bats an eye lid as I do my digging

Look at the potential all over the place

Location: S. Croce, Gerusalemme Piazza, Rome Mobile Garden: Since October 15 2011 Guerrilla gardeners in Rome together with community gardeng groups and other Romans have created mobile edible gardens made from wooden boxes from fruit and veg markets and earth filled hemp bags to contribute a optimistic and practical spectacle to their occupation outside the contro- versial church of Santa Croce. You can find out

Italian guerrilla gardeners create mobile gardens as part of Occupy Rome, Italy

Occupier Gardening - Wall Street protestor’s slogans encourage changing the way we live our lives, and back up the call with practical workshops

Location: Wall Street, New York, USA Guerrilla Gardening Workshop: October 2011 Guerrilla gardening is occupation, the appropriation of territory with plants. When the land is unloved and neglected such occupation is typically ignored by the authorities (which is just fine). When the land has a more intense use or symbolic role guerrilla gardening tends to be less permanent (for a gardener this is more like a flower show) because for a protestor the short lived plant is serving a different purpose to those of a gardener. Here, for the first time I see guerrilla gardening used in a protest whose heart is far from a gardeners in a way that isn’t at the mercy of plants. It makes practical use of the energy and optimism within a crowd that has multiple objectives to change society. This is just one of several different skills being tutored in the occupy camps (I’ve seen dance instruction in London). What might the seeds of this protest end up flourishing into and where?

Seed Ball Demonstraiton Today Overgrow Transform

Trans Europe Tulip Attack Guerrilla gardeners across Europe planted tulips beyond their boundaries on October 9 in a great show of shared determination, fun and optimism for spring. Some in organised groups (look at the

forces in Italy!) and others as solo efforts. Presented here are a few shots. Click the location to see more images of the day

Guerrilla Gardening in Hungary and Serbia

Terra Di Nettuno (Guerrilla Gardening Bologna)

International Tulip Guerrilla Gardening Day

Location: The Northern Hemisphere Guerrilla Gardening: Sunday 9 October 2011 For the second year GuerrillaGardening.org is calling for tulip planting on 9 October on land beyond your boundaries, ideally sorry looking public land that is in need of a bit of spring cheer. Last year several hundred took part and Lyla 1046 and I planted clumps in many of the Motorway service stations up the M1, which was delightfullyy

visited the plots in April. Already guerrilla gardeners in Paris, Belgrade, Rome and Amsterdam are organising events. In London I’ll be cycling around the city meeting keen guerrillas in their local patch to help out: Islington, Kensal Green, Elephant are up for it.

Location: All around London SE1 Guerrilla Gardening: 6 September 2011 The Duchess of Cornwall took a tour south

London urban gardens today and was easily persuaded to join in help me chop some more of the remaining lavender harvest from Transport for London land where approval still only remains informal and verbal and funding is from your generous support. Our

Harvesting the guerrilla lavender at Westminster Bridge Road SE1

before we were back on the vintage bus and I acted as tour guide pointing out tree pits around SE1. We disembarked at the lavender field for a little harvesting, with HRH bringing

Royal Bus and guerilla gardeners along a handy Highgrove trug. I pointed out the neighbouring pumpkin field before getting back on board for more guerrilla garden spotting (including the still contested garden where I live that Southwark Council charge my neighbours and I £4000 for our gardening so they can subsidise maintenance elsewhere - the rascals!). Gasps were heard. Then onto

My three guests on the bus ride: From left: Nikoufer Patel, Christopher Woodward and Lyla Patel

Pointing out the guerrilla pumpkin patch

Location: St George’s Road, London SE1 Guerrilla Gardening: 3 and 4 September 2011 I’ve admired raised bed pavement guerrilla gardens in New York and Berlin (where

was even five tiers high). They resist wind blown litter and trampling and provide more space for roots than pavement level treepit gardens. But not until now had I built one. With the comfort of darkness I left home with a saw, power drill, two bits of old shelf and two large tree stakes that I’d salvaged from mature street trees It proved a fiddle ensuring it could be firmly wedged into the recess of the shallow tree pit, and a lively conversation starter with passers by . But after three hours sweat it took shape and I filled it up with sacks of top soil and peat free compost kindly donated by Kevin in Acton (who was moving house and also gave us lots of rare foxgloves and verbena). The next day Christina and Lizzie (returning from retirement) helped Lyla and I plant it up with cyclamen and dianthus. Let’s hope it stays.

Location: Westminster Bridge Rd, London Harvest: Sunday 21 August 2011 Never before has rain and drizzle been such an adversary, but this year it foiled us three times, as eager harvesters were turned away day after day before we finally got most of the crop cut. Alex, Paula, Sunny, Niloufer, Lyla and I worked in a pairs grabbing bunches and chopping a handful, and we even persuaded one passerby, Paul, to stop by and help us for an hour. We left a little lavender for the bees to enjoy and for a special guest to help harvest in a few weeks time. We dry the lavender and then gather in living rooms to stitch and stuff it into

Niloufer cuts the edge of the cycle path lavender tunnel

Alex and Paula. The dreaded Rosemary beetle

Denmark Hill sunflowers and Volkswagen Campervan

Location: All around the Northern Hemisphere Guerrilla Gardening: 1 May 2011 The Blooming Results: August 2011 1 May was the fifth International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day. It’s for the guerrilla gardening gambler, you really do win some and loose some with sunflowers. They are so very vulnerable as seedlings but so triumphant if they make it too maturity and bloom. So well done if you guerrilla gardened with sunflowers and now have a bright blooming victorious display to show for your efforts. I’m keen to gather success stories (and failures if you want a bit of long distance sympathy and encouragement for next year). Please upload your photos and comments

Elephant and Castle guerrilla sunflowers

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