What Is Guerrilla Gardening?
From NarratingLandscapes
This is the template for a meaning. For my research project, I chose to take a look at the practice of guerrilla gardening. Guerrilla gardening, a term first coined by Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, refers to gardening with a direct, non violent message. It has typically been associated with politics, and land rights and reform, but today is used as a more common label to refer to many different styles and types of gardening. Before a guest, who shall remain nameless, came into our class and showed us his own guerrilla gardens, I had never even heard of the movement towards reclaiming and greening our everyday spaces. His gardens, filled with useful food plants, were in direct opposition to the tendency of UBC landscaping towards ornamental trees that, while pretty, serve no useful purpose other than their looks.
UBC campus is very wide, and has a lot of open space, covered with roads and grasses. There are some trees and foliage around, but they are very tidy and orderly, which gives the campus a very stilted and artificial feel. The reason why movements such as guerrilla gardening are useful to our study of anthropology, and to any examination of human beings all over the world, are because they represent the ways that people come to identify and interact with not only their environment, but also each other. The fact that so many people around the world are joining forces and planting in their urban environments tells me that the wish for change, and for our spaces to be better utilized, is becoming widespread and universal. It is useful in understanding our most fundamental human interactions, as groups of people secretly converge and plan ways to bring their environments back to life. These ways are often illegal. Complicated relationships result, between activists and authorities, guerrillas and landscapers, everyday passersby and the reaction they have when they discover a garden, or do not notice it at all and continue on their way, as I have now realized I had often done. With this project, I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the guerrilla gardener, and see for myself what it means to be a harbinger of change.
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Supported by the Arts IT Fund at UBC