While I was doing a little research, I stumbled upon an interesting article by the Los Angeles Time. This article was on guerrilla gardening and I have never heard of this before. So, what is guerrilla gardening?

Guerrilla gardening is political gardening, a form of non-violent direct action, primarily practiced by environmentalists to reclaim the cities. It is related to land rights, land reform, and permaculture. Activists take over and squat an abandoned piece of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. Guerrilla gardeners believe in re-considering land ownership in order to reclaim land from perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it. To summarize, guerrilla gardening is the act of seeding useful plants in public spaces.

Technically, guerilla gardening is a kind of graffiti or vandalism - just done with plants instead of spray cans. Some guerrilla gardeners carry out their actions at night, in relative secrecy, to sow and tend a new vegetable patch or flower garden. Others work more openly, seeking to engage with members of the local community, as illustrated in the examples that follow. It has grown into a form of proactive activism or pro-activism.

The term "guerrilla gardening" is applied by some quite loosely to describe different forms of ‘radical’ gardening. This includes gardening as an entirely political gesture rather than one with genuine horticultural ambition.

To give you a better idea of what guerrilla gardening is, here are some examples:

Probably one of the most famous was London May Day protest in 2000, where Reclaim the Streets (RTS), a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces, organised a mass guerrilla gardening action in Parliament Square, London. Thousands of guerrilla gardeners occupied the square and planted vegetables and flowers. During this expressly non-violent gardening action, a maypole was erected around which many of the gardeners danced. Several banners hung in the square reading like ‘The Earth is a Common Treasury for All’ and ‘Let London Sprout’.

In 1996, Have på en nat (Garden in a night) was made by the Danish Organic Starters. An empty piece of land in the middle of the city at Guldbergsgade in Nørrebro, Copenhagen Denmark was transformed into a garden in a single night. About 1000 people took part in the project.

More examples and events can be found on Guerilla Gardening’s blog.

Another interesting article can be found here including some pictures.

Have you seen someone doing any guerilla gardening? What do you think about it? Feel free to share your ideas below in the comments!

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