Location: Stamford Street, London, SE1
Guerrilla Gardening: Sunday 19 April 2009
This central London patch has been guerrilla gardened for two years now. Sunflowers have been the primary crop and a few strawberries but we’ve been keen to grow more food here for a while. The impetus to get going came from my visit to the National Vegetable Society in Canterbury. I talked about guerrilla gardening and afterwards Brian gave me trays of young veg seedlings. So Andrew 1679, Sunny 1600, Susannah 2877 and I gathered at 6.30pm to weed, plant and sow our veg and mulch a bit. Who gets the eat the veg is the big question? Us or passers by? To be frank we’d rather passers by didn’t harvest the cabbages, mangetout, spring onions, green beans and strawberries, which is why we’ve hidden them amongst our snap dragons, pot marigolds (good for deterring bugs) and small (but growing) clumps of montbretia. As for their nutritional value… well there is the issue of pollution to reconcile. Two years of growing sunflowers here should have taken some of the possible lead out of the soil and we believe a good wash should suffice - all part of a well balanced diet of poisons.

Location: St George’s Hill Surrey, UK.
Guerrilla Gardening: 1 April 2009
On 1 April 1649 on the outskirts of the village of Cobham Gerrard Winstanley led a group up St George’s Hill to plant vegetables on what was common ground - for grazing but not for gardening. It was a response to rising food prices and sense of political injustice. I see this as an early act of guerrilla gardening and find Winstanley’s story inspiring. His political aims went beyond those of most guerrilla gardeners I have met and his legacy lives on within a wide range of movements. By coincidence perhaps, the G20 protests in London took place on the 360th anniversary of this guerrilla gardening but I spotted his name cited as inspiration for the “Black Horse” march from Cannon Street. It made sense to go along, to mark the day, and discuss Winstanley’s ideas. Despite media reports and some brutal incidents elsewhere that day, the march I attended was tense but chatty. I handed out sunflower seeds and discussed guerrilla gardening with all sorts of people who were, there to raise awareness of homelessness, inequitable land distribution, the need for land tax and housing policy. Later in the day Lyla 1046, and Heather 1986 headed for the St George Hill to mark the day and make our mark. A small stone memorial was erected ten years ago in commemoration and we set about sowing a few sunflowers around it. Unfortunately directly opposite this symbolic location was a layby in which a police car was parked. Within a few minutes of a pottering around with trowels and seeds the car drove over to pull in next to us and an officer got out to enquire about our actions. After we had shared our horticultural tips with him he left (but like the officers in London, he refused my gift of sunflower seeds) we continued on towards Redhill Road, which is marked as near the location of Gerrard’s dig in 1649. We planted a few more symbolic sunflowers (optimistically hoping a few might survive this shady location). The opportunity to plant further up St George’s Hill is not available without break in and trespass (so we didn’t). Compared with 1649 the hill is now a gated community of luxurious homes. So we finished our journey at the nearby Silvermere golf and leisure complex, and told the barman about his local history. With some satisfying curiosity, he took our sunflower seeds.

Location: Hazel / College Road London NW10
What was to be a dig with four of us turned into a force of more than ten today as Jenny 1636, a new and local recruit via Al Jazeera TV brought along her extended family. Also new (though less local) were two Japanese women who had heard about us on TV back home. So it was spooky, given the impact of TV at recruiting for this dig, that a TV was there littering the garden! You can view my very short video snap of the dig here.

As holiday weekend arrives I invite you to wander around your neighbourhood on the look out both for potential places to guerrilla garden - hey why not even plant something, go for sunflowers if you’re a northerner (by which I mean hemisphere), bulbs if you’re down south (please excuse my sweeping horticultural generalisations) - and also see if you can spot some existing guerrilla gardens. Here its great to see our scarlet tulips rise again and here’s a short video of the ‘Greatest Hits’ around London, England in the last few years.