My grandmother is an inspiration to me. Her garden was a holiday playground, whether dancing round a sprinkler when I was little or wrestling with the rambling roses when I was a bit older. She’s helped out guerrilla gardening in London but at home in Devon her focus is on litter picking round her local recreational ground. It’s a chore the local authorities do not do enough for her liking, but one she sees as a healthy part of her weekly routine to get out of the house. But she’s been making plans to get back to the guerrilla gardening front line. She told me about a shabby triangular bed near her home, one the local council plant twice a year with sparse bedding but then abandon, but needed help to get it going. So on a recent visit I joined her for a night of action and planted a couple of Viburnum and a Golden Holly. Gardening alongside my 93 year old grandmother was great fun, not just because of all her experience but because it’s a pedestrian stopping spectacle. She even got a kiss from a stranger!

Planting the red tulips

My name is Elise. I am a French woman, aged 71. Sometimes last Spring, I heard on one of the French radios a report of your activities. I was immediately delighted and interested, being by nature strongly independent and against any form of authority and conformism. Challenging authority is for me a must (with a wink & great pleasure for doing so!), I know it might sound stupid at my age, but this is so! So, I immediately sensed that Guerrilla Gardening was something just for me. In addition, we are in my family (contrarily to most French people) strongly interested in gardening and plants. I lived in the country when I was young, link with nature is very important to me, and I always run to the window when I wake up for weather & wind direction. Anyway, this was just to introduce myself and now, here comes my own story.

Soon after having heard about you and G. Gardening, I spotted in a nearby street from where I live a forlorn concrete planter with no plants in it. At that time, I earnestly thought it belonged to the Direction of the Paris Parks & Gardens Department called “Département des Espaces verts de la Ville
de Paris”. It was not so, but since I thought then that it was an “official” planter, this was to be MY beginning in G. Gardening!!!!

At the end of the Summer and after having successfully grown Nasturtiums and Eruca Sativa, (both mix well for wonderful spicy salads!), I discovered that the planter belonged in fact to the building under which it was sheltered, alas, from rainfall and that it had been placed there to prevent bums from sleeping in this sheltered place. Of course, no inhabitant in the building had ever thought of cultivating flowers or other plants in it!! Anyway, at first, the excitement of the illicit worked on me like a rocket launcher! The planter was full of filth, cigarettes cadavers & so forth. The earth was bare and hard as stone.

Near the street where the planter is located (Rue Lhomond), there is a small flower shop owned by a very nice man, about 50, and since I needed help to start watering this big planter, I told him about Guerrilla Gardening and would he help me? He was enthusiastic and he came at night with big water cans and poured about 20 litres of water: then I could start literally ploughing that deep planter with a big knife I have bought especially for extracting plants in the woods and gardening in my windowsill garden. Hervé (that’s him) sold me first class Compost at a very good price. This Compost was of a supernatural quality. I spread a big quantity and finally I planted in Nasturtium and Eruca sativa seeds. The only problem with this planter is that it is unfortunately protected from rainfall, which is exactly the reason why bums had adopted this place for sleeping … So I had to carry a lot of water from my home (about 10 m. on foot from the planter) during the whole summer.

It all turned out to be spectacular. All these pictures will show me Guerrilla Gardening in Paris, 5th area, called the Latin Quarter (quartier latin), which is where I live.

After last Summer’s experiment (I shall make it shorter) I was frustrated since I had done some work in a private planter, and I was very happy to discover last September that a big official planter from Direction des Parcs et Jardins sitting in my street, had a shrub in it which had practically died with the Summer drought, not being watered enough by the municipality. This time, it was in my street, opposite to where I live!!! So I did REAL guerrilla gardening this time just before Xmas, cleaned it from beer bottles & cigarettes, pruned the shrub, moved the earth with my knife, gave it Compost and planted red Tulips at Xmas. This time, I was able to have the pictures compressed, and I will send you some so that you can see what I did … Fortunately, a neighbour girlfriend accepted to act again as photographer while I was gardening!

In addition, I started planting some more tulips at the foot of Street Trees which are called by the Paris Parks Department “Arbres d’alignement” there are circular iron gates at each Tree Foot with very little earth and I am not sure I shall succeed this time. Fortunately, it rained a lot in the autumn, then we had now and hopefully, the tulips come out in a few months. I only planted about 12 tulip bulbs, for they cost quite a lot here, but if they come out, there will be 12 trees decorated with a tulip flame at their feet, great … A little later, when the frost is gone, I shall keep on planting sunflower seeds under the trees.

One last ting I must specify is that I do all this in day time (which makes it even more “dangerous”, since I would be so scared to go about roaming in town at night on my own doing G. Gardening, and on top, I am a “morning” person, not a “night” one, so there it is!

Elise pruning the neglected shrub

Topping up with fresh new compost

Botswana is rich in natural beauty, precious creatures and diamonds. It is also increasingly vulnerable to environmental abuse and climate change. The rapid rise in wealth and urbanisation has created a culture of negligence for the local environment in the thriving capital , similar to the mood in industrialised countries in recent decades. The British Council there - keen to raise awareness of environmental issues - took the potentially controversial decision to invite me to talk about guerrilla gardening and, more importantly, to bring my professional experience of communications planning, to environmental groups in the form of a day long seminar. My hope was to find some local guerrilla gardeners and understand more about the issues over there. And I did. Nkagisang 7229 came to one of my presentations and invited me to visit her guerrilla garden. It’s a huge extension to her own garden, on land owned by a judge! She grows vegetables (dinawa, spinach, rape, cabbages) in winter and grass in the summer, for pleasure, for business and for charity. Some of the food is distributed to children in an HIV clinic, some sold. The full story of her garden, and her guerrilla harvesting can be viewed here in my home video of the visit.