The history of guerrilla gardening

A few weeks ago, we attended the Herrenhausen Garden Festival to give a talk on guerrilla gardening (you can find the presentation here ). This was a good opportunity for us to finally write a blog post on the topic.

From the tear gas-filled People's Park to the trendy roof garden on Google's London office, guerrilla gardening has had a meteoric rise. It's hard to say today what the most important milestones for the movement were, but for me the origin is the occupation of a vacant lot in Berkeley. In 1969, students occupied a University of California campus and declared it a place for free speech, which should also be converted into a park. Shovel in hand, the students went straight to action. Several thousand volunteers began transforming the area into a park until the then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, forcibly cleared the park. The brutal police operation left one demonstrator dead and many more seriously injured. Nevertheless, the protests for the park and the nightly occupations continued unabated, and in 1972, after three years of street battles (the full story is told here in pictures) , the city of Berkeley had had enough. They leased the land from the university and officially declared it a park. The students won, and greening urban spaces became established as a form of protest.

The term guerrilla gardening or green guerrillas was coined somewhat later in New York City by Liz Christy. In 1973, the then bankrupt city was in a spiral of violence. Central Park was almost inaccessible and there were many abandoned properties in the middle of the city. Ideal conditions for Liz Christy, who and her friends began to green these wastelands and establish community gardens . Unlike in Berkeley, the city was grateful for Liz's efforts because communal gardening curbed the violence and gave people something to do and food to eat. As a result, Liz Christy's group even received support from the city and the Liz Christy Community Garden still exists today. This movement was also the first to use seed bombs to green the city.

The next major moment for guerrilla gardening came in 2000 in London. Under the motto "Resistance is fruitful," environmental activists dug up Parliament Square and planted it. Unfortunately, the action was poorly executed from a horticultural perspective, and the square was more destroyed than sustainably replanted. For many citizens, this action cast a rather negative light on guerrilla gardening. Nevertheless, the term has since become familiar to most people, and the subversive greening of urban spaces has become an increasingly widespread activity.

This has gone so far that in recent years, more and more cities and municipalities have been leasing land to their citizens, providing funding for community gardens, or at least revising the mandate of their parks departments so that beautifully landscaped traffic islands aren't simply mowed down. In my next post, I'll present some examples and discuss how you can get involved yourself.

Until then,
Goal