Guerrilla Gardening: Seed Sowing For Hooligans
March 27th, 2024
The sneakiest way to impact environmental change by the end of this summer. But shhhh, you didn’t hear it from me ;)
Hi. Before we get this article started, I just want to say thank you so much for the insane reception on my first article. I hoped maybe five people would read, but was utterly shocked that there were over a hundred of you. My article reached eight different COUNTRIES, (?!?!??!?) and 17/50 of the United States. Which is crazy considering I was crossing my fingers that I could get my boyfriend, sister, and parents to read.
Thank you to each and every one of you for reading my work, I hope you continue to stick around. I am so grateful to you all.
ANNOUNCEMENT: I opened an email!!! I sincerely want to know what you guys want to hear about on this page, so please please email me at zoefortheplanet@gmail.com. I have about a million things I could write about, but would love to be able to cater to my audience. Because, after all, this is for you.
The idea for this article came to me in a yoga class, where as the snow pounded down on UVM’s campus, I struggled being present in the moment because I could not figure out what to write about following last week. Then I shifted to seed pose, and it hit me.
As we enter the spring season, grocery stores, pharmacies and more will have seeds. Little pockets of units of promised life as long as you take care of them.
Gardening is a difficult thing to do, I will admit. It takes a lot of knowledge of a lot of different things to do it right, well, and in a way that’s ecologically sound. Gardening has changed my life. It is one of my favorite things to do. (Check out @zoe.inthegarden if you ever want to see me work my magic)
You might be down on your luck thinking about how maybe you wanted to garden, but don’t have a plan or space to plant. Maybe you just don’t know how.
What if I told you that there was a way you could garden in a way that benefits local spaces, local biodiversity, and gets the job done all in one day?
Let me introduce you to the wonders of guerilla gardening.
In principle, guerilla gardening is literally illegal. No matter where you are, it is against the law. But rules are meant to be broken, and you’re not killing anyone by helping the environment.
By definition, guerilla gardening is when people “adopt” orphaned land via parking lots, unmanaged parks, and even those little patches of crusty dirt on the curb of urban areas that may have once housed a tree.
Guerilla gardening is a MOVEMENT. One of my personal idols, Richard Reynolds is an incredible guerilla gardener based in the UK, decorating streets and what he calls “pocket parks” with beautifully interruptive color, pattern, and texture. I highly recommend you read his blog, look at his instagram, or even read his BOOK!!! What a guy.
Let’s talk about why guerilla gardening should matter to you. To frame it, remember that every square inch of developed land that you walk on was once completely untouched. Your college campus could have been a forest, your house a vast grassland. Our planet, and all the natural living and nonliving components are almost programmed to “understand” a certain pattern. Not a single one of those patterns on any stretch of this earth is related to societal development. Guerilla gardening aims to renaturalize whatever portion of developed areas is possible.
There’s tons of different methods to guerilla gardening, and if you find yourself to be more interested in this topic, email me and I can point you to some more advanced resources and methods, but here’s an awesome start, and my preferred method.
SEEDS.
To me, the sneakiest and most fool-proof way to guerilla garden is to start from seed. That way you can scatter them and leave without a noticeable trace until things start slowly growing. I would recommend scatter seeds, a favorite brand of mine that I have worked with is Renee’s Garden Scatter Garden Seeds. There are many options of scatter seeds in the Renee’s catalog, each of which are about 32 oz canisters filled with a seed blend, each individual blend designed for a different purpose. There are plenty of other seed mixes from different brands that you can order online, but Renee’s will be available in many garden stores come this spring.
INTENTIONS.
As with everything when it comes to impacting environmental change, it is important to do things with intention. Select the purpose of what you want your guerilla gardening to bring to your space. Are you targeting pollinators? Are you cover cropping barren land to benefit soil? There is truly a seed blend for everything. I personally love to guerilla garden with the intention to help native pollinators. I plant with seed blends of native plants that benefit pollinators. To find out what plants are native to your area, you can easily google “(STATE) Native plant list” and get the entire list of woody and herbaceous plants that are native to your area.
NATIVES.
Native plants are critical to the success of your local environment. Native plants are plants that are indigenous to the natural pattern of the land you inhabit. Native plants differ from place to place. If you looked through the blog I linked above, you may notice that people guerilla garden with plants that are out of place, for example, succulents. This is fine, but I personally recommend native plants for the preservation of local biodiversity as well as the fact that NATIVE PLANTS CAN BE LEFT ALONE. If you guerilla garden with just native seeds, you will never have to return to your site to water, prune, anything. You can be sneaky and do a one time plant and then stop by in the future to enjoy.
BE INCONSPICUOUS
Like I said earlier, guerilla gardening is, by principle, illegal. DON’T BE OBVIOUS, DON’T BE STUPID. I know that it makes no sense that planting pretty beneficial plants is illegal, but weirdly enough, it totally is and I do not want any of you all to get in trouble. Go at night, toss seeds out of your pocket as you pass by a location, do whatever you need to do to not get caught.
MAKE A STATEMENT.
Before I say this, let me just reiterate that ANY form of environmental effort for change is monumental, noteworthy, and important. BUT! Guerilla gardening is often used as an act of protest, a means to make oneself known, start movement towards ecological change in a community. Do it somewhere big. Make all the cracks in the pavement of your neighborhood teem with wildflowers, bring butterflies and bees back to your town square. Guerilla gardening is beautiful, bold, intense, and is an action that speaks way louder than hoping for a better future.
Do something for the earth this spring, it is literally SO easy. If you read this and do something, email me pictures, I’d love to see them. Talk to you next week. Happy gardening and HAPPY SPRING!!! Plant a flower, dammit.
Staying stealthy and making waves,
Zoe.
(For the Planet)