OneWorld.net (U.S.)

OneWorld.net note: Guerrilla gardening, a movement that can be traced back to Johnny Appleseed, is springing up in areas of urban sprawl as citizens scatter seeds in vacant lots and abandoned sidewalks to make their neighborhoods greener.

• Milton Puryear began guerrilla gardening under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York City. Out of his initial efforts grew The Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, a program that seeks to create a "safe, landscaped, off-street route along Brooklyn's waterfront, in order to improve quality of life, healthful recreation, and transportation for all New Yorkers."
• Richard Reynolds began guerilla gardening in London four years ago to "wage war on the neglect of public spaces," and he has since published a book on the "history of people growing things where they shouldn't."
• Guerilla gardeners frequently throw "seed bombs" into abandoned areas and then leave these bundles of seeds mixed with fertilizer to sprout after rainfall. Gardeners can learn how to make seed bombs at home from seeds, clay, and water.

Resistance is Fertile: It's Time to Start Guerrilla Gardening

From: Media Rights

Published on July 15, 2008

By Shira Golding

"Our greatness, our talent has never been the question. It's been a matter of grappling for control over what we do." - Spike Lee

Spike Lee is considered a pioneer of what has become known as guerrilla filmmaking, a do-it-yourself ethos that goes against and outside the system. Guerrilla filmmakers work with miniscule budgets and often without permits, under the radar of authorities or the mainstream media. While many lament the cooptation of "independent" filmmaking by Hollywood, guerrilla filmmakers are motivated by passion, and the movies that they make speak to community interests and needs on the most grassroots level.

While the guerrilla filmmaker's most powerful weapon is a camera, there is another group of street-level activists who use a different arsenal - dirt, seeds, and trowels. Guerrilla gardeners see the urban environment as space that needs to be reclaimed and transformed through the planting of flowers, fruits and vegetables. While many community-minded green thumbs nurture local parks and gardens and work within the system to campaign for greener streets, their guerrilla cousins take direct action by planting in vacant lots and sidewalks, without permission and often in secrecy.

As long as there has been "property" there have been guerrilla gardeners planting in the cracks. The 17th century English movement known as the Diggers went so far as to create anarchist agrarian communities on common land in an attempt to rise above the conditions imposed on them by the ruling classes. And in the early 1800s, Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman brought apples to the American frontier, by planting seeds on public lands and leaving the orchards in the hands of locals.

In more recent years, guerrilla gardening has exploded in cities like Chicago and New York where waves of development have too often ignored the need for green space. In neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification, like where I live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it is very common to walk down a block and see three or four empty, fenced-in lots that have been bought by developers, but which are just sitting there, collecting trash. For this scenario, guerrilla gardeners have come up with the perfect weapon - the seed bomb.

As the D.I.Y. gardening blog funtimehappygardenexplosion explains, "A seed bomb is a little capsule with everything you need to grow a plant all bundled up." Specifically - clay, seeds, dirt, and if you're really serious, worm castings. You can make seed bombs in the comfort of your kitchen, put them in a tote bag, and throw them over fences into vacant lots on your walk to the subway.

While seed bombs or "seed grenades" are usually an organic affair, they can take on numerous forms. The New York City Green Guerrillas, founded by Liz Christy in the 1970s, filled balloons with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer. Today, innovative designers are coming up with all kinds of creative distribution techniques, such as Bloom, a device that is affixed to a bicycle and blows seed bubbles while you pedal.

But lest you think the seed bomb is cutting-edge technology, it is actually part of the ancient technique of "no-till farming," which was reintroduced by the famous Japanese farmer and microbiologist Masanobu Fukuoka in the 1940s. Alongside the organic and permaculture movements, Fukuoka pioneered farming techniques that work with instead of against nature, an approach that good guerrilla gardeners should consider before getting their hands dirty.

If you're going to throw seed bombs or cultivate a patch of bare soil on a sidewalk, it's best to pick plants that will thrive without too much effort. Since "these plants need to look after themselves a lot of the time," London guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds explains, you should focus on plants that don't need a lot of water and that are known to thrive in your geographic region.

Just as guerrilla filmmakers are sometimes stopped by the police for not having a location release, guerrilla gardeners have been met by resistance by property-owners and authorities. Surely there is nothing more tragic for a guerrilla gardener than spending a night planting flowers only to find them uprooted the next day. But more often guerrilla gardening beautifies, starts conversations and ultimately strengthens communities.

And sometimes what starts underground gains mainstream acceptance. Spike Lee made She's Gotta Have It in 1986 for under two-hundred thousand dollars, and, after much critical acclaim it grossed over seven million dollars in box office sales. When Brooklynite Milton Puryear started planting what he calls "crack gardens" under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, his main objective was to make his neighborhood greener and safer for local kids. His guerrilla gardening efforts inspired others in his community and over time transformed into a full-fledged nonprofit initiative called the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which is creating a continuous pedestrian-friendly, plant-filled path along the Brooklyn waterfront.

To learn more about innovative environmental movements, visit Media Rights.