Location: Elephant & Castle roundabout, SE1
Guerrilla Gardening: 25 March 2009
Budget: £107.74
This narrow strip along the bottom of a fence on the roundabout opposite my tower block is what I’d call a seasonal bed. I’ve only ever successfully planted annuals here, cutting away the weedy turf and sowing ridiculously easy nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) - which should you fancy it make a nice salad (I didn’t). My tentative digs here have been vulnerable to the occasional visit from an ad man who changes the hoarding above and ignores the bed beneath by plonking his truck stablisers on it unless the patch is in obviously tip top shape. So I decided a more permanent garden was needed here with more permanent and bigger plants. The first issue to resolve was the soil. It’s very shallow because the concrete foundations of the fence extend under the bed. So I stocked up with new top soil, peat-free compost and packed my string-on-sticks to cut the bed wider. At the appointed hour (roughly 8.30pm) Clara 005, Lyla 1046, Sunny 1600, Julia 2274 and I wheeled the old shopping trolley of ammo over the road and got digging, once again making elegant use of the ‘half moon’ spade to cut a neat edge. The police were soon there too but Julia and I saw them off with a few cheerful reassurances and got on with enriching the soil. As with the Steedman St dig earlier this month the planting scheme was a mixture of solely decorative plants and edible plants. Purple wallflowers (Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’) with aubretia made up the bulk, both are content in well drained soil, and both are perennials. In between we sowed lettuce seeds, red lollo rossa, that look great anyway, but amongst the purple flowers should be sufficiently disguised to be passed over by urban foragers (as if that was seriously a problem, neither humans nor slugs particularly like this part of the neighbourhood). Sunny brought along a small Azalea that she’d saved from the bins of the flower market (and we planted in a well of acidic soil which is likes) and we also found room for a couple of hollyhock (Althaea rosea). And even though we didn’t plant any more, like last year, there will probably be self seeded nasturtium appearing too. All in all an hour and a half front line action.