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.

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Monarda 'Beauty of Cobham', Lavetera, Anthemis 'Sauce Hollandaise' from the RHS show in the Perronet House gardens.

Stunt cyclists vandalise the beds in Februrary

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.)

Project Twenty Nine: Hawley Road, Camden, London, N18

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 Troops