Sunflowers in the central reservation of Denmark Hill
I’d forgotten all about planting these sunflowers. Back in May I was passing here, pulled over and prodded in the contents of half a packet of seeds in what was a barren central reservation on the busy Denmark Hill. It’s a dicey location, not one to spend long on for fear of getting decapitated by a passing truck, but I forgot to even make a brief return visit for weeding or anything. It was down to nature to take on the fight to brighten up this road. Now, nearly five months on.they are towering as high as a double decker bus and look like they have weeks of life left in them yet. Slugs had no chance of tracking them down here on this island of fertility in a desert of tarmac. Some had been damaged by passing traffic but it just goes to show how easy guerrilla gardening can be!
The incredible guerrilla garden of giant Sunflowers of Parliament
We must thank either negligence or tolerance by the horticultural contractors for the triumphant blooming of giant sunflowers in guerrilla gardens in central London. We planted the seeds back in May and hoped the young plants would not be strimmed away. As you can see we have been successful. Best of all, the sunflowers in the tatty rose bed opposite parliament have now bloomed too as defiant cheerfulness facing our miserable leaders. You may recall International Sunflower Guerrilla Day on May 1… well these pictures are the result in London. You can see more pictures on Flickr and view a short film I recorded of them on YouTube. Share pictures of your guerrilla sunflowers in the boards of the Community.
Sunflowers on the Embankment opposite Parliament
Community support officers pass by the Parliament sunflowers
The third annual lavender harvest from our two traffic islands in central London began at the civilised hour of 4pm. The sun dried blooms were ready for picking, stalks and all, back to where the pale new growth is coming through. Six of us divided into two crops, of “grabber”,“cutter” and “bundler”, which turned into a race down each side of the largest bed. Pam 184, Sarah 265 and GreenSpirit 4925 easily beat me, Lyla 1046 and new-comer Hypatia 5367. The aroma was verging on the nauseous but the drivers at the traffic lights seemed to enjoy the sweet breeze and a passer by came over to thrust £10 in my hand as thanks. Expect new Lavender Pillows for sale by October.
GreenSpirit and Sarah with the huge back of harvested lavender
After guerrilla gardening for two and half years. 7 August 2008
I get enquiries from all sorts of different media asking to come guerrilla gardening but it is rare they offer to pay for a lot of plants. This contribution came from a highly unlikely source: a TV show fronted by Noel Edmonds (a celebrity famous for fronting a gambling game show, inventing a pink monster called Mr Blobby and being an advocate of Cosmic Ordering). So I said yes and agreed to their help with a new dig in Scotland on the grounds that the suitable plot must be found by an active local guerrilla gardener who would be up for keeping the ‘fight for flowers’ going after we had left. I found the brilliant Clairwill 3163 who in turn found orphaned land in an historic district of Rennie Mackintosh’s birthplace. Word was put out on the Community page for local support and the TV people enlisted Gail Porter to bring some glamour and enthusiasm to what they feared might be rather dull dig. (perhaps because late in the preparations they sought approval from the local council). Thankfully permission was given, (the power of TV / cosmic ordering perhaps) but this also meant the presence of St Andrew’s Ambulance and a pair of security guards was needed. So it was quite unlike any other dig I’ve done, not guerrilla gardening but still a struggle against the urban wilderness. We uncovered some roses amongst the rampant green dogwood and planted Heuchera, Cyclamen, Vinca and Montbretia to tolerate the shady conditions. The dig began at 8pm but was not complete until past 2.30am, but gardening at this time enabled more people to turn up. Enlistment was fantastic. The local troops were not just pleased to be getting stuck into a dig but also for being triggered into finally getting together and share ideas for future projects. The film of the dig will be broadcast within Noel’s HQ on Sky 1 in the evening of Sunday 14 September 2008.
Project Five: St George’s Circus, Southwark, London, SE1
Last time we were here a Transport for London foreman thundered over to ask “what are you doing with my plants”. He was out late resurfacing the road, which was unfortunate for us, but we took the chance to tell him these were really more our plants, since we had planted them (all but the two old Cordyline that is). It was a reminder, that even though we have been regularly gardening this roadside location, territory is never secure.
Regardless, we continue to take responsibility for this old circus (clown free mind you) and it’s slowly maturing into quite a show. Since our last big visit in mid June my brief stops have been insufficient to keep the performance up to scratch so I called up five troops to do a clear out and mulching. Several previously thriving specimens (euyonumous, heather and sunflowers) had prematurely succumbed to the hot blasts of bus exhaust fumes and wayward stomps of stray short-cutters so with bright rakes and forks (looking strangely similar to the Star Wars lightsabers on a passing bus) we ripped them out and made space for new planting with a couple more dark spiky phormium.
The cascading gardens of Perronet House now contain plants from the RHS Hampton Court Palace flower show
Most guerrilla gardeners make use of neglected land and from time to time we make use of neglected plants too be they surplus, damaged or even a bit diseased. One place to find discarded plants is at a grand flower show - exhibitors bring more than they need to ensure only the best make it into their gardens and after the show some plants are discarded because the cost of removing them is too great. It’s all rather sad and embarrassing for them, but rich pickings for those who know where to look. So with all this in mind (and after having dispensed with the idea of protest stunts outside their shows) I wrote to the Royal Horticultural Society to see if I could make a garden entirely from discarded plants and materials from the Chelsea and Hampton Court Palace flower shows. They said yes.
The Recycled Garden
The drama of making this show garden is on another blog TheRecycledGarden.net, but once the show was over I had a great bounty of plants to distribute. Some went to a legitimate community garden in Brockwell Park, some to my first guerrilla gardens outside Perronet House, some to St Mathias primary school in Hackney, some to the guerrilla lavender field of Westminster Bridge Road, some to guerrilla gardening in Camden and some to my brother’s back garden in Herne Hill. If you have plants to spare please leave a note on the Community section of this website offering them to locals.
You may recall that in February the gardens I tend beneath my tower block were attacked by some youths on bikes. I’d forgotten all about their visit until this morning when I met one iof the vandals again in very different circustances. The encounter confirmed my approach of ‘bug a hoody’ (and not the ‘hug a hoody’ as some English politicians have been advocating recently). The technique involves interupting their mischief, aligning your self quickly with their flagrant disregard for law and appealing to their sense of recklessness (if only it was that easy, but in my case this time it was). So this morning I was in a bicycle shop buying a new inner tube and cycle pump and the attendant comes up tome and says “are you that guerrilla gardener?” I confirmed I was one of many, and he then reminded me that we‘d last met when he was trampling my shrubs. Remarkably he was keen to say how he and his stunt gang now avoid all flower beds when looking for urban corners to jump around in and when it came to totting up my bill he gave me a 10% discount. It just goes to show what comes of grabbing a vandals bicyle and shouting! (Of course I take no responsibility if your action in the garden leads to being stung by nettles or bottled by thugs.)
In March Sarah 265 led the transformation of a barren traffic island into a promising garden of box hedge (see previous blog entry). A month later when we met to give the bushes a trim we were amazed to discover our first case of ‘rip up and replace.’ Our garden had gone and in it’s place was an immaculate assortment of dazzling new evergreen shrubs, including euonymus and phormium. A lot of money had been spent on the work and we presumed it was the work of a municipal contractor. It looked much better than what we had done, remarkably imaginative actually, but we were miffed that our promising new project had been taken back by the authorities - perhaps we had provoked them with our work or perhaps the replanting had always been planned and our box hedge (which admittedly was in need of a trim) was dismissed as unkempt mess? Either way we’d lost a garden. We’re not ones to dig up someone else’s shrubs so instead we hung around and met girls from the local youth centre, gave them sunflower seeds and planted a few in a weedy patch near by.
Before the bind weed has smoothered the plants
Now fast forward three months and Sarah 265 discovered neglect had once again struck this sorry patch and the council’s new shrubs were swamped in a blanket of bind weed. (This perhaps was of no great surprise) They seemed not to have touched it since putting the new plants went in! Some were dead and pint glasses and beer cans nestled in the undergrowth. This land was ours to reclaim!
After our blitz
So with Jean-Francois 5088, Rosco 17 and Olly 4672 along to help we uncovered the remains of the garden beneath and filled in the gaps with a couple of fuchsias and two more golden euonymus. This time the local youth didn’t take so much interest in the garden and turned down my offer of hand tools but cheerfully sat around the bed chatting while we gardened. We were done in an hour and were encouraged to see that some of our sunflower seeds planted round the corner had shot up and looked ready for flowering.
The cabbage palm were growing in this central London traffic island long before we started guerrilla gardening around them, but one has been doing so at an increasingly unruly and frankly wmbarassing horizontal angle. Should we let it be or try and upright it? Well after some debate Andrew 1679, Christopher 1178 and I staked it upright several weeks ago… but this was the beginning of the end. The stake was weak and the palm got blown around, roots cut and it withered. So this afternoon we sadly dug it out and carted it off to be pulped at Battersea dump.
Read your garden and it will tell you messages - that’s one of the techniques a practitioner of permaculture uses to plant sympathetically and create a low maintenance garden. Here for example we do not dig the soil but just occasionally add top dressing. But there is still litter to collect and that tells us messages too. I’m convinced our plastic bottle blight is the activity of one high energy drink addict. I am regularly picking up Lucozade bottles (seldom any other brand) from the same clump next to the traffic lights. Does anyone have a remedy for this? Perhaps it’s the soporific aroma of our lavender that triggers the fly tipper’s energetic outbursts. Dig deeper (metaphorically that is not of course actually) and you may even find more messages. I almost cut myself on a sharp spike pinning a letter to the ground. It was addressed “To the Urban Gardeners” and simply thanked us for our work transforming this corner of London.
Forgotten Sunflowers of Denmark Hill
