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.
NEWS: Engagement
Location: Westminster Bridge Rd, London, SE1
Back in February 2008 I planted a cherry tree in our big guerrilla lavender shrubbery. It was a gift from Claire 2812 and Stephen 2819 (one might have expected lilac from them) to mark their engagement. And now, like the confetti at a wedding, I’m glad to report it’s blooming brilliantly and even thought it’s an autumn flowering variety it still gives its main blossom in spring. What with the fresh red tips of the Photinia this corner of London is looking splendid already this year. Tulips next.
Location: New Kent Road, London, SE1
Guerrilla Gardening: 22 March 2009 First we planted sunflower seeds (on 1 May, International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day), and last October during the Guerrilla Gardens of SE1 Guided Tour I got a group of new troops digging in ‘Jet Fire’ daffodils (small yellow ones with an orange trumpet). This are now flowering, and I returned for a long over-due tidy up of the dead sunflower stalks (potentially useful stakes) now that the heads have shed all their seeds to the winter wildlife and hopefully self seeded for this year.
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.
NEWS: Friday 5 December 2008
Regular readers of this blog and those who have read the final chapter of my book On Guerrilla Gardening will know that a year ago I secured a significant guerrilla gardening victory when Southwark Council refunded me and my neighbours three years of their fraudulent charges for gardening that guerrilla gardeners had done voluntarily and agreed not to charge us again. But two weeks ago our annual bills arrived and they include the charge. I hoped it was a mistake but this week I got a response from Margaret O’Brien, Head of Housing asserting that the refund was an error and that the charge will be imposed. Not because they were going to resume gardening again (no, thankfully permission has been granted for me to continue as a volunteer) but because of an entirely resolvable anomaly that groups our block with a cul-de-sac housing estate several streets away. In today’s paper our oily local Conservative councilor (who has a track record of causing trouble at Perronet House) Kim Humphreys weighs in backing Margaret’s decision. The council’s scandalous and incompetent stance about this issue has lit the blue touch paper here as other residents join the fight and the grounds maintenance issue becomes a focal point for a range of other grievances. Read more about the highs and lows of Perronet House here.
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.
Sunflowers in the central reservation of Denmark Hill
I’d forgotten all about planting these sunflowers. Back in May I was passing here, pulled over and prodded in the contents of half a packet of seeds in what was a barren central reservation on the busy Denmark Hill. It’s a dicey location, not one to spend long on for fear of getting decapitated by a passing truck, but I forgot to even make a brief return visit for weeding or anything. It was down to nature to take on the fight to brighten up this road. Now, nearly five months on.they are towering as high as a double decker bus and look like they have weeks of life left in them yet. Slugs had no chance of tracking them down here on this island of fertility in a desert of tarmac. Some had been damaged by passing traffic but it just goes to show how easy guerrilla gardening can be!
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.
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.)
Easter Weekend
