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St George's Day DigsSt George's Circus St George's Day
Pimp Your Pavement Click HereGuerilla Gardening SE1
Location: St George’s Circus & Borough Road, SE1 Guerrilla gardening: Friday 23 April 2010 Budget: About £50 St George’s Day celebrations at St George’s Circus.. Borough Road Guerrilla Gardening
I invited London guerrilla gardeners (using a newAfter
Facebook group) to mark the day and asked them to bring red and white plants. Between us we had white pelargoniums, red pansies, red salvia, red poppy seeds and I found some appropriate red and white Snap Dragons! While fancy dress outfits are not something I recommend for the guerrilla gardener who wants  to avoid undue attention or indeed distract sceptics from their enthusiasm for gardening perhaps on this day we would have blended in better had we worn  red and white face paint and carried cans of beer.  There was a regular trickle of patriotic revellers  Borough Road During Guerrilla Gardening
passing by, one stopped to wave his flag, others  looked bemused. We moved on to a new tree pit at  Borough Road and as the strains of “Maybe It’s  Because I’m A Londoner” wafted across the road  from a pub karaoke we pimped the pavement with a Paris daisy, thyme, oregano and African daisies. Our lack of fancy dress and sober exhaustion meant the planned revelry in the pub afterwards just didn’t feel right. We’d already had our street party for the night. Borough Road Before
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Three Way Marginal - A sunny day sets on a new yellow, red and blue tree pit opposite the Imperial War MuseumThe handy bike trailer (made by Andy 287) full of gardening munitions
Location: St George’s Road, London SE1 Guerrilla gardening: Saturday 17 April 2010 Budget: About £45 I led a class of The School of Life plant up a new A student digs in
guerrilla garden this morning, a newly enlarged but rubble-filled desolate tree pit a couple of minutes from my flat. The ground didn’t look promising but  we cleared a lot of stones, poured in fresh soil and  planted up this marginal piece of central London  with a topical general election planting scheme.  Good soil discovered beneath the rubble
Greens were inevitably well represented, a red rose “Pride” for Labour, yellow African marigolds and  yellow thyme for the LibDems and blue bacopa and lavender for the Tories. What will do best here? Pimp Your Pavement - Click Here
Pot plants representing the three leading UK political partiesBefore guerrilla gardening
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Warding Off Evil!Wilm and the Frei GartenAkademie's protect us from the banking industry, with garlic
Location: My living room... but in theory anywhere garlic can grow. Spring 2010Frei Garten Akademie
My guerrilla gardening friend Wilm fromMuensterin Germany visited me in London recently
and came bearing gifts. First a garden gnome made entirely from biscuit (which you can see Wilm was about to destroy to make our pudding until I intervened and gave the gnome a stay of execution (sadly mould got him in the end). Second, a new idea to use guerrilla gardening to ward off evil. Wilm is distributing gloves of garlic (a traditional deterrent of evil forces) for guerrilla gardeners to plant outside banks to help prevent them causing any further economic calamities. What a great idea. But so far I’ve struggled to find any patches of soil anywhere near my local banks, they all seem to exist in the most sterile of environments.
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No Battle At The CastleFor-get-me knots thrive in their third year now growing alongside the verge above the  pedestrian underpasss
Location: Elephant & Castle, London Visit: 15 April 2010 Our advance across this Transport for  London territory has been gradual over the last 3 years but successful, and despite two unexpected belligerent encounters with TfL horticultural contractors at non-gardening GG events over the last 18 months, those in power have thankfully let us get on with making this huge roundabout a bit more colourful while they get on with making the buses and tubes work. Even the oneTulipa, Campanula, Heuchera, Vinca, Lavandula, Viola, Sedum thriving  beneath the chevron sign
threat of arrest I’ve had for guerrilla gardening
(that occurred in this location) has not deterred us from gardening, and with the  tulips, wallflowers, forget-me-nots and aubretia in full bloom, it’s clear it makes sense.
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Sweet pea pimped pavement. Before the guerrilla gardeningOlly 2087 clears the weeds and digs over the compacted soil
Location: Borough High Street, London SE1 Guerrilla gardening: Saturday 27 March 2010 The generously proportioned tree pits in this newish patch of pavement five minutes away from me has been a tempting opportunity for a while, but it was only when the season’s weeds started advancing  and confirmed the soil‘s fertile potential (and the neglect) that the chance to garden became too  good to ignore. With the help of Olly 2087 we  cleared them out, carefully dug over the soil (so as not to disturb the tree’s roots), added a couple of  bags of compost (because some of the tree pits were more sand than soil) and planted someGuerilla gardeners kick ass
Anemone coronaria 'Sylphide’ bulbs (prettier thanthe name suggests), and some pansies. Given
how splendid the window boxes and tubs were outside the neighbouring pub, and because  I was suffering a small tinge of guilt that perhaps they might consider this pavement ‘their  turf’, I popped in to fess up to a bar maid about our guerrilla gardening. She was delighted,  got it straight away, and offered to help water. With that encouraging development I returned the next afternoon to add some sweet peas (that will hopefully clamber up the wire mesh  casings around five of the trees) and give the tree pits a scattering of protective wood chips.
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Location: Tijuana Mexico & Brighton UK Guerrilla gardening: Recent years A rare and inevitably rather fleeting form of guerrilla garden has caught my eye again:  pot hole guerrilla gardening. If you don’t mind  sacrificing a few plants to rapid obliteration by a car tyre (and risking a rather more bloody sacrifice of your own) there is undoubtedly  great delight in seeing a bright colourful life  emerge from these perilous blights in our public landscape. I see these little gardens and want to  believe that they could stay there and thrive, Pot Plants
Pete Dungey pothole guerrilla gardenA truck poised to pass over Shannon Spanhake's pothole guerrilla garden
but I've never dared try and test this hope.Pete Dungey has.He's an artist in Brighton, and he
told me “I wanted to do something that would grab attention but also raise awareness of an issue”. That issue is the prevalence of potholes. Pete’s car suspension has been an expensive victim to a pothole and he’s also an enthusiastic cyclist. For road users his little guerrilla gardens seem to work as a bright hazard sign. “People seem to go out of their way to avoid the holes when they see the flowers” he says and apparently some have survived as long as a day. An alternative way to raise awareness of this problem (all be it far less floral or delightful), has been attempted by a
69 year old renegade spray can man in Huddersfield knownas The Yellow Pimpernal. Pete
has yet to get in trouble, perhaps because the gardens do actually provide a temporary cushion for traffic. Prior to Pete’s pot plants I heard of Shannon Spanhake, who planted potholes of Tijuana beautifully as a gesture to involve the community. You can read an interview about her
work here and seemore pictures herePerhaps we'll see more pothole guerrilla gardens soon?
Tijuana pothole guerrilla gardeningShannon Spanhake plants potholes
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