Andrew arrives with plants on his bike

The Seed Gun made by Christopher 1594

This is the patch we have made The Sunflower Triangle. But sunflowers die in winter and keel over pitifully as twiggy ghosts of their former selves. We left this lot up as rich pickings for hungry birds but today was time for decapitation and a tidy up. Christopher 1594 from Richmond USA and his girlfriend joined us. Chris is the creator of the Seed Gun (Read more here) but helped us by chopping off the sunflowers’ seed heads from the stalks. We took some home for drying and seed saving and scattered the rest around the bed to self seed and provide food for the sharp eyed pigeon. Even though it is now winter there is still an opportunity to plant instant colour and Andrew 1679 provided it by bringing some red Cyclamen persicum on the back of his bicycle which we dotted around the edge of bed, vaguely reminiscent of red cats eyes along the edge of a UK motorway.

Chopping the seed heads off the sunflowers

Decapitated sunflower seeds

After the cut backs

A guerrilla garden by the Malboro and M1 junction.

Work took me to Johannesburg this week so I stayed an extra day to learn more about local guerrilla gardening. To show me around I found Amanda 5637 and her fiancee Greg who generously spent the day giving me a whistle-stop tour of this city of contrast. First was an ornamental guerrilla garden of native plants by a busy motorway junction. Amanda had seen a man tending the plot and collecting donations from cars stopped at the lights. Today vendors were there instead selling sunglasses and they told us their gardener friend Patrick had sadly recently died (though not while gardening I assume).

Rasta Park, Parkhurst.

Next was the boldly signed “Rasta Park”, an informal patch of grass, tubs and a palm enclose on the edge of Parkhurst. These patches on otherwise unremarkable ground were the exception in a city where the parks department takes great pride in planting central reservations and verges. In recent years they have replaced traditional European-style planting with native species that require much less water, such as the bold African Lily (Agapanthus africanus) and residents are replacing the grass nature strips outside their properties with natives too.

African Lily (Agapanthus africanus), Westcliff

Recent tree planting in Soweto

In preparation for the spotlight of the 2010 World Cup the Greening Soweto project has been filling the old township with 1000s of new trees. But there are still plenty of opportunities for guerrillas!

The abandoned strip outside the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto

Outside Soweto’s Hector Pieterson Museum is a narrow earth strip that points towards the sight where Hector, aged 13, was shot. A metal plaque described the bed as being full of grass, but this has all gone. So I got busy with a packet of the only plants I had to hand - sunflower seeds - and used a biro to prod them into the soil.

Me planting sunflowers outside the Hector Pieterson Museum

Thomas, the security guard, takes a packet of sunflower seeds

A security guard called Thomas soon came out quizically wondering what I was up to. He was delighted, I gave him another packet of sunflowers and he encouraged me to talk to the staff. They were pleased with the gesture and offered to water them.

My notice to residents of my tower block

There is no longer quiet on the home front. The cascading public planters beneath my tower block in London’s Elephant & Castle that I have tended since October 2004 are once again contested space. Until now 14 months peace had reigned there as an amicable truce was agreed between Southwark Council’s housing office, the negligent horticultural contractors and me. The council even surveyed residents to seek objections and received none. My three year campaign guerrilla gardening there (with help from other residents and guerrillas from far and wide) resulted in triumph: the council gave me verbal approval to continue gardening with the simple condition that I must give them one month’s notice should I want to stop, they refunded residents of all ninety flats three year’s worth of their fraudulent grounds maintenance charges (about £100) and assured us future charges would be dropped while I continued gardening there. Were the guerrilla tactics necessary? Yes. The council told me that had I asked before I gardened I would never have got permission. It was a win-win situation as I saw it. I got to garden and everyone else got the garden for free.
Since that agreement in September 2007, enthused by the confidence that comes from gardening legitimately I have invested more of my time and money into the public beds and in return the garden has flourished – last month we were awarded a GREEN CORNERS AWARD from the Conservation Foundation ‘for brightening London and enriching the city’s bio-diversity’. Even now, in late November the yellow Dahlia ‘Party’ are holding up well, the Paris daises (Argyranthemum frutescens) continue their speckled white show and some winter pansies stoically give some cheer at the front. The garden is beginning to relax for its natural holiday season before the exertions of spring. But, despite the military convention of holding back from war in winter that’s just what has been declared in the form of a dispatch from Southwark Council to every resident in Perronet House.

The Green Corners award for the gardens of Perronet House

What follows is a cathartic download of the new troubles; a detailed journey from the start of the recent troubles to the moment Southwark pressed the big red button. If you can bear a tale of red tape, ruffled feathers and bonkers bureaucracy then read on to the post below… I Shall Fight For My Right To Garden.

Happier times: me by the gardens of Perronet House

The first sign of trouble was a letter from the council asking me to acknowledge a series of insurance issues and health and safety requirements. Quite rightly, and as I had always assumed, they were making clear I was liable for my risks. Their series of safety tips were sensible and required no change in my gardening techniques or design. But it seemed odd to have received it so long after our previous agreement.

The next rumbling of unrest arrived in the form of a bloated e-mail from a notorious serial complainant who lives in the block - under the emotive and usually irrelevant moniker of “disabilities rights campaigner” she hit newspaper headlines for spewing 3,500 e-mails to Southwark Council in one year and for nearly being ‘gagged’ by them. This time I was caught up in her typing frenzy. She copied me in on a complaint to the council about the supposedly low standards of an interior flowerbed in Perronet House with an aggressive focus on me as the cause. My explanation that this was not a bed I had agreed to regularly maintain, that this was something another resident primarily looked after and my dispute about her horticultural judgement was met with silence from the council but pungent words from the e-mail’s author. When I passed her in our entrance hall she responded to my greeting with the pantomime-like, “You’re finished, you’re finished, you’ll never be gardening here again.” And so a whole new front had opened up. No longer was it just the lumbering bureaucratic Bracchiosaurus of Southwark Council but unfortunately also a poisonous jellyfish-like neighbour clumsily jabbing at me, in what I thought were friendly waters. For her politics are more important than pragmatism: the argument seems to be “it is the state’s job to do the communal gardening inside and outside and volunteers have no rights to do take this over” (even if that will cost everyone more and standards will be lower).

A week later two senior officials from Southwark’s housing department requested a meeting. I had them round to my flat for afternoon tea. With recording equipment on the table tense conversations began. They were very reluctant to detail why the meeting was necessary except that it was in response to complaints. I pressured them to give details of the matter so I could comment on them. They reluctantly explained. It turned out the issues were all matters of poor communication and misunderstanding. I had not realised they wanted written agreement about the insurance and safety matters (which I have now provided) and they had confused a separate matter about leaks in our block’s exterior (triggered by a visit from BBC Gardener’s World TV show) with my voluntary gardening. We then relocated to the gardens and I showed them my work. It was a friendly conversation and one official compared it favourably to his own garden. And yet the parting conclusion was they would still need to review their legal position. They needed to be absolutely sure I could continue. Fair enough. I expected to receive a letter at some point with a conclusion, one that I was prepared to take to court. That letter has not arrived.

Instead, and I am incredulous about this, the equivalent of a big red nuclear button has been pressed by Southwark Council. I have received a bill, as has every other leaseholder in the building. They have reinstated their annual charge at Perronet House for “Grounds Maintenance” (Grounds Maintenance is their chilling description for either total horticultural neglect or low-skilled, bi-annual hacking and mulching by a poorly motivated contractor). Why oh why? Last year they refunded us and assured us future charges would be dropped but now they have reinstated it with no explanation - £45.79 for my flat alone. My optimistic conclusion is that it’s a clerical error, further evidence of Southwark Council’s institutional incompetence and terrible internal communications. They have pressed the red button unaware of the significance of the damage it will inflict on everyone, including their reputation. The pessimistic conclusion is that this marks a return to their insistence that the gardens of Perronet House are theirs to maintain and not for me or any other volunteer to take on. This regressive policy is being implemented by stealth, tucked within a page of far bigger costs and rises in our service charge. I will not buckle from their new bureaucracy and the bill is not a fait à compli.

I shall fight, for my right, to garden.

Will 3902, a student from Goldsmiths is doing a project on DIY culture and his e-mail asking to meet arrived just as I was preparing for a solo bulb planting mission around the Elephant & Castle. So I got him along and planting. We put in more “Oxford” red tulips, Allium Christophii and Narcissi “Jet Fire” in three established guerrilla gardens, including the bed where police had interveened in April and insisted we stop. Today all was well in the garden and there was no police intrusion. Click here

Will 3902 planting bulbs at the Elephant & Castle

to watch a video of that police visit.