Guerrilla Gardening

Guerrilla Gardening 

This gardening is done on land that the gardeners do not have legal right to use, often an abandoned site or area not cared for by anyone. It encompasses a very diverse range of people and motivations, from the enthusiastic gardener who spills over their legal boundaries to the highly political gardener who seeks to provoke change through direct action.

The land that is guerrilla gardened is usually abandoned or neglected by its legal owner. That land is used by guerrilla gardeners to raise plants, frequently focusing on food crops or plants intended to beautify an area. This practice has implications for land rights and land reform; it promotes re-consideration of land ownership in order to reclaim land from perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it.
Some guerrilla gardeners carry out their actions at night, in relative secrecy, to sow and tend a new vegetable patch or flower garden in an effort to make the area of use and/or more attractive. Some garden at more visible hours to be seen by their community. It has grown into a form of activism.

Etymology

Guerrilla gardeners planting vegetables on previously empty space in downtown Calgary, Canada.

The earliest recorded use of the term guerrilla gardening was by Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group in 1973 in the Bowery Houston area of New York. They transformed a derelict private lot into a garden.The space is still cared for by volunteers but now enjoys the protection of the city's parks department. Two celebrated guerrilla gardeners, active prior to the coining of the term, were Gerrard Winstanley, of the Diggers in Surrey, England (1649), and John "Appleseed" Chapman in Ohio, USA (1801).

Guerilla gardening takes place in many parts of the world - more than thirty countries are documented and evidence can be found online in numerous guerrilla gardening social networking groups and in the Community pages of GuerrillaGardening.org.The term bewildering has been used as a synonym for guerrilla gardening by Australian gardener Bob Crombie.

International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day 1 May

May 1 is a day when guerrilla gardeners around the world plant sunflowers in their neighborhoods, typically in neglected public places such as tree pits, shabby flower beds and bare roadside verges. It has taken place since 2007, and was conceived by guerrilla gardeners in Brussels,(who go by the name of The Brussels Farmers). They declared it Journée Internationale de la Guérilla Tournesol. It has been championed by guerrilla gardeners around the world, notably by GuerrillaGardening.org and participation has grown each year since then. In 2010, more than 5000 people signed up for the event from North America, Europe and Asia.Although sunflower sowing at this time of the year is limited to relatively temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, this day is also marked in other parts of the world by planting appropriate to the season.

Example of Guerrilla Gardening

People's Park in Berkeley, California is now a de facto public park which was formed directly out of a community guerrilla gardening movement during the late 1960s which took place on land owned by the University of California. The university acquired the land through eminent domain, and the houses on the land were demolished, but the university did not allocate funds to develop the land, and the land was left in a decrepit state.
Eventually, people began to convert the unused land into a park. This led to an embattled history involving community members, the university, university police, governor Reagan, and the national guard, where protest and bloody reprisal left one person dead, and hundreds seriously wounded. Parts of the park were destroyed and rebuilt over time, and it has established itself into a permanent part of the city.