A 28-Day Challenge to Create More Guerilla Gardeners Around the World Launches Today
Stephen Colegrave on the phenomenal rise, positive effects and infectious joys of Guerilla Gardening and a new worldwide campaign to involve more people.
More than a thousand first time Guerilla Gardeners around the world are expected to take up a 28-day guerilla gardening challenge launched by the charity Earthed – today. The challenge aims to help them create their own guerilla gardens on discarded, abandoned, or unloved and under-utilised patches of land, bringing life, greenery, food, pleasure, and beauty where before there was none to make their own powerful statement to green the streets. These intrepid gardeners are based on six continents, in India, South America, America, Europe and the UK.
Guerilla Gardening is nothing new. It has a long and proud history of political and social activism. It pre-dates the climate emergency and although the phrase itself was coined by Liz Christy and her Green Guerillas in1973 (more about them later), the origins go back much further.
The Diggers
It can be traced back to the 17th century when a group of religious and political dissenters, known as the Diggers, attempted to farm common land. Splitting from the Levellers, who believed in natural rights and were an important part of Cromwell’s first Civil War, the Diggers were agrarian socialists or rural communists, centuries before either term were used.
The Diggers were only active from 1649 to 1651, but in this time, they practised Guerilla Gardening on an impressive scale. They planted vegetables in common land, at St George’s Hill in Surrey, driven by hunger because wages were low and food prices sky high. Surrey in 1649 was nothing like today’s well-off commuter belt; the land was hard to farm, and agricultural wages were some of the lowest in the country. The Diggers took over common land, but the local landowner soon retaliated and sent gangs to attack them.
After one of their communal homes was torched, they moved to Little Heath in Cobham. Here initially the Diggers made great strides in creating their rural commune, successfully growing and harvesting winter crops on 11 acres of common land and building a hamlet of six houses. But their success was their undoing, scaring the local aristocracy who saw them as the seeds of revolution and threatening the social fabric even more than Cromwell’s model army. By April 1650 the Diggers had been driven out of Little Heath. Other Digger groups set up around the country but by 1851 they had all disappeared. Oliver Cromwell did nothing to save them.
The Diggers might have been stamped out, but they had established the political and social activism of cultivating common land. Until then Common Land had given ‘commoners’ certain rights to graze animals but not to be seized, cultivate and turn it into a commune, overturning all property and ancient common land rights.
In America, 18th and 19th century slave gardens have sometimes been seen as the origins of guerilla gardening. It is true that in South Carolina slaves were permitted to sell produce from the gardens they were allowed to cultivate, often in the woods and marginal areas, according to Frederick Law Olmstead (1822- 1903). In some places slaves were given land to sustain themselves and earn money, but any attempts by these gardeners to have any form of basic freedom or human rights, let alone political or social activism, were immediately and cruelly crushed.
The Green Guerillas
In the second half of the 20th century, Guerilla Gardening was properly established. It is no coincidence that in the early 1970s the Green Guerillas were created by Liz Christy, Amos Taylor and Martin Gallent in the same area that early New York Punk originated. Here in the Bowery in Downtown New York, the area had been largely deserted by the rag trade that left Manhattan in the 1960s, leaving empty lofts soon to be populated by would-be rock stars and junkies from Iggy Pop to Blondie. The Green Guerillas made their own punk gesture by throwing seeds over the fences of vacant lots, planting sunflowers in the middle of busy streets and in the window boxes of abandoned buildings. Soon, not far from the famous punk club CBGB and Andy Warhol’s Factory, in an empty lot strewn with debris and rubbish, they created the Bowery Houston Farm and Garden. This became the base for the Green Guerilla Gardening movement that fought urban decay and the decay of city communities at a time when New York City was bankrupt. The movement were determined to take things into their own hands:
“It was a form of civil disobedience,” recalls Amos Taylor, “We were basically saying no to government, if you don’t do it, we will.”
There are now over 600 community gardens in New York and the Green Guerillas are still very active today. Green Guerillas have sprung up around the world most notably in Munich, where Guerilla Gardeners were initially opposed by the city authorities but now hold the annual Street Life and Blade Festival with their blessing.
Guerilla Gardening Now
This century, interesting spin-off projects have launched the idea of cultivating waste and under-utilised land at scale, such as the Incredible Edible project that has been taken up around the world. In 2008, Pam Warhurst, businesswoman and former council leader in Todmorden, Yorkshire, decided there was huge wasted potential in not growing food in public spaces. The Incredible Edible project has been incredibly successful. It now has 273 volunteers and the local council even provides it with a list of neglected and waste ground that can be cultivated. Their so-called propaganda farming has created productive plots all over town. Even the local health centre has its own apothecary garden and there are now 170 Incredible Edible cells around the UK and over 1000 around the world.
Guerilla Gardening still has the power to be political as well as to bring communities together, as seen by the Grenfell Garden of Peace, a living and poignant memorial to a terrible tragedy, for which shamefully nobody has been prosecuted seven years on. This garden was created without any plan or strategy by Tayshan Hayden-Smith who lives in the adjoining estate. Tayshan is a great example of today’s guerilla gardener. As well as presenting BBC Two’s Your Garden Made Perfect, he is a footballer and community activist. He founded of Grow2Know, a gardening not-for-profit project set up in response to Grenfell which aims to democratise gardening and blow apart its middle-aged and middle-class Gardeners Question Time image.
Over 50 years after the Green Guerillas brought their own form of punk gardening to Downtown New York, Guerilla Gardening is very much part of the Green Revolution. That’s why newly created environmental educational and community platform Earthed, a charity whose mission is to democratise access to practical and accessible ways to restore nature, build community and grow food, has chosen it as their first community challenge. They have issued the 28-day challenge to get more than 1000 new guerilla gardens created around the world and regreen the streets.
Earthed have teamed up with East London green activist and Guerilla Gardening expert, Ellen Miles who has created weekly video classes to help new gardeners create their own Guerilla Gardens including how to find a suitable place, ensure that no invasive plants threaten local biodiversity and how to get the community involved. New gardeners can compare notes and share their gardens on the Earthed platform’s online community, all around the world. The challenge seeks to ensure “every balcony, street & city can burst into life.”
Anybody can take up the 28-day Get Guerilla Gardening Challenge as long as they apply by 17 September here. All the video tools and community platform are free for all new Guerilla Gardeners.
Earthed aims to create a whole new generation of Guerilla Gardeners, who will manifest the spirit of the Diggers and build new gardening communities that challenge the status quo.