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.

There is an air of death and destruction in gardens across the northern hemisphere in recent weeks because of startlingly savage frosts (yes, even in bucolic central London). They finally put to rest the unseasonably cheerful sunflowers and nasturtium plants and left a satisfying wake of mess to tackle and holes to fill. I stocked up with a few treats from a garden centre (spending prize vouchers from last years London Green Corners competition win yes siree) and left with pots that appeared to have nothing in them except for wet mud. They do of course hold herbaceous promise (Echinacea ‘Vintage Wine’ and ‘Sunrise’ as well as Eupatorium rugosum ‘Chocolate’ - do an internet image search if you can’t wait until summer). I also found some more immediate fillers, a couple of flowering Hellebores that are now at home in the Elephant & Castle. But mostly January is a time to be tidying up not risking new planting. Plastic bags are particularly cloying and destructive plant stranglers in the rain and I have noticed, in this post Christmas detox period, that the count of fruit juice bottles, orange peel and banana skins is also on the rise (all those ads for healthy eating must be having a positive impact… just not on my gardens!) Now is also a good time to get pernickety about your lawn edging. I’m a great believer of clear demarcation for a guerrilla garden - it avoids confusion between a lawn mowing contractor and a plant growing guerrilla - I hopefully need not remind you of the devastating losses of wild flower guerrilla gardens in London and Torre due to the difficulty of territorial demarcation. And so, with the edge of our Stamford Street guerrilla garden looking increasingly ragged I invested in a half-moon lawn edger and called up Andrew 1679 to be chief engineer. Edging well is all about the line. You can ensure it’s straight by tying string between sticks and cutting away the ragged edge along it. And the end result is a garden a little bit bigger than it was before!

Our scattering of old sunflower seeds has all been eaten or washed away now and, as Andrew 1679 put it,”I’m always leaving apples to go a bit soft”, so he brought along some for the birds. But this
was no ordinary apple, oh no, it was a guerrilla gardeners’ sunflower-seed-encrusted apple, proudly pierced through with the young twig of a local ash and trussed on white cotton string from the low branch of an organically grown rowan (as a TV chef might say). Step back and enjoy the birds as they flock to the garden for dinner time.

It’s Christmas all year round at St George’s Circus since we planted a Christmas tree in the centre of the bed. Our first tree passed away a while ago but there’s been a baby one there since last January when Meike 155 and I salvaged one from Andy 157’s Christmas decorations. But it’s so shy there hiding amongst the Rosemary and Lavender giving no festive cheer to the passers by. So I cobbled together a shining star from cardboard, silver foil and old garden wire and tied it on this evening.

Incredibly, despite the cold weather, the short hours of day light and that we sowed these sunflowers in May, they are still in full bloom in winter. Could this be evidence of global warming? Not this time. These did not mature and bloom until September, well after we harvested the lavender and gave the seedlings adequate sunlight. They have only grown to a third of the size of their giant siblings, (and it will take a chill of -2°C to accelerate their decline). A great accident.

Location: Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1
Incident: Friday 5 December 08
An exotic looking giant beetle bit a chunk off the corner of our lavender field this morning after careering through the crash barrier. No one was hurt but a few clumps were uprooted. The car was an estate agent’s, and this crash is perhaps fitting for the the times. A jogger asked me was it an ad?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.