Adventures in Community Gardening

Recently I’ve been getting into guerrilla gardening. There is a plot in Morningside, belonging to the railways, that started as a garden a few months ago. I try to go every couple of weeks.

Guerrilla Gardening is when an individual or group of people starts to work a piece of common land, with or without (and usually without) permission from the land owner. I find it very exciting, as I think that regaining common land is very important. Council land, for instance, is owned by all of us, and the council of that town is paid to look after it for us. Sometimes this is done well and sometimes it isn’t but its important to remember that they are not the land owner.

So anyways, one of the things I like best about this plot is that in a place that people walk past all the time. As the gardening is done most often on a Saturday afternoon, there is the opportunity for people to stop t ask us what we’re doing, and often ask if they can join. When it started most of those there were not local to the area, now most of them are, which is quite a good example of local people taking ownership of a project started by outsiders.

Guerrilla Gardening is not a long term solution, but is an interesting method of protesting, of pushing the council and other relevant bodies towards including the community in the use and maintenance of common land.