City fields instead of a sea of cement
They are illegally planting flowers, herbs and veggies on traffic islands and strips of green, in backyards and on the roofs: the ranks of guerilla gardeners are growing and growing.During the day he cuts his customers’ hair, in the evening he trims the chives: you might find Sebastian in London, Berlin or Vienna. He is in his in his late twenties, lives a green life, environmentally and nutritionally conscious, considers himself to be a critical consumer and would like to be a little bit self-sufficient, at least with his food. So Sebastian is raising tomatoes on the window sill, chives illegally on the little green plot in the back yard and he tends to them carefully. "It makes me feel good!"
Sebastian was encouraged to try out his green thumb by "Guerilla Gardening", a not-so-new movement of "garden pirates" that are freely cultivating urban space. Ecological claim, political protest and artistic application - their motto is: make the city more beautiful - a call to guerilla fighters to snatch up their rakes and seedlings. As early as the 1970s they started turning Manhattan’s street ditches, empty city plots and green strips into vegetable patches. Guerilla Gardening entered the public spotlight on 1 May 2000 in London. Sebastian tells the tale: On that day globalisation critics, anarchists and environmental activists all met on the congested Parliament Square to dig up the grass with shovels and spades and plant it with greenery. "They wanted to reconquer the street."
Manifest and seed bombs
Great Britain, the land that invented the garden cult, has also produced the most famous protagonist of guerilla gardening to date: Richard Reynolds. When he was around thirty he was not only helping London’s streets to sprout flowers with his illegal nocturnal stints, by pulling weeds and sowing plants, he also wrote a book: "Guerilla Gardening - A handbook for gardening without boundaries". Including a section on the "tactics, equipment and choice of botanical weapons". This guide to gardening of a different kind was published in 2009 in German as well. And with his website Reynolds has created a virtual meeting place for the international community of botanical activists. Here, global guerilla fighters find helpful tips for successful city gardening and can make plans for their so-called "digs" - when they meet to dig up a piece of ground and plant something - at night, of course. Here you can also find out how to make seed bombs and where to best drop them.
"I don’t need things to be that spectacular", says Sebastian, "especially because in the very green city of Berlin the little guerilla shoots are hardly noticed. And you don’t have to worry about fines in Vienna." The city of Vienna has reacted to this trend with a pilot project for permitted greening of public spaces: Citizens can pick up a permit in the 15th district. The Vienna city gardeners provide expertise, dirt and sometimes even the plants. An approach that hopes to tame the civil disobedience of the guerilla gardeners - thereby definitively cutting to the core of the movement: "The cultivation of land that belongs to someone else without their permission."
Désirée Schellerer
