As twilight settles and the roads clear, the guerrilla gardener strikes again

In 2004, Richard Reynolds was living in a flat in London’s Elephant and Castle. Several storeys up, he didn’t have a garden, of course, which was a source of disappointment to him, if completely understandable given the location. But more irritating was the fact that the communal areas around his block were somewhat unedifying as well.

“To be honest, they were a complete tip,” recalls Reynolds. “I would look down on them and they would be overgrown, full of dead planting, choked with litter…”

The local authority seemed to have little interest in brightening up the verges and tiny squares of green surrounding the tower blocks. So Reynolds decided to do it himself. He went out to one tiny patch of land and tidied it up, planting it with flowers.

Then in his twenties, Reynolds had always had a passion for gardening. Growing up in Devon, he would eschew football in the playground to instead spend break times working on the school gardens, teaching himself how planting worked, learning on the job.

“I always just got a lot of pleasure out of it,” he says. When he had the idea to brighten up the pockets of greenery around Perronet House in London, he had no lofty ambitions of kickstarting a global movement. He was just doing it for his own entertainment, and to hopefully provide, as a side benefit, some pleasure for the other residents.

He started a blog, called GuerrillaGardening.org (it’s still online, but not updated very often; Reynolds prefers social media such as Facebook and Twitter to document his projects these days). “I didn’t think too much about it, it just sounded right,” says Reynolds. It conjures up people sneaking out in the dead of night in balaclavas, swooping on a site and then disappearing into the shadows.

“That’s pretty much what I did the very first time,” laughs Reynolds. He had no real idea whether what he was doing was illegal, so under cover of darkness he carried out his first foray into guerrilla gardening. And he discovered that he really, really enjoyed it.

Reynolds learnt as he went along that secret agent subterfuge in the wee small hours wasn’t always necessary. He says: “I learnt that the best time to do it was the early evening, when officials and council workers aren’t around but people from the local community are. It gives locals the chance to see what you’re doing and talk to you about it, rather than just waking up to see that a verge outside their house has been planted up in the middle of the night.”

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He started the blog to share his escapades with his friends, but never anticipated how popular it would become. It was a slow-burner; this was in the age before social media became ubiquitous, so it was through Google searches and serendipity that people stumbled across his blog.

However, towards the end of 2004, when an enterprising researcher on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour came across the website, Reynolds was featured on an episode. There was a flurry of media interest throughout 2005 and 2006, with Reynolds approached by people across the country doing the same thing, or others interested in starting and desperate for him to share the benefit of his experience to help them get going.

More people joined Reynolds on his gardening forays around London, at first friends and then total strangers. It became part of a global movement. “We gently inspire each other,” says Reynolds. “Help each other to overcome gardening and bureaucratic challenges.”

When Reynolds registered the name “Guerrilla Gardening” for his website he chose it because he thought it sounded good; he didn’t realise until much later that the term had been used before and that the concept had been pretty big in the United States three decades earlier.

In 1973, New Yorker Liz Christy took a vacant, abandoned lot at the corner of Bowery and Houston Street in Manhattan and, with the help of neighbours and friends – dubbed the Green Guerrillas – transformed it into a community garden. After Christy’s death in 1985, it was named the Liz Christy Bowery-Houston Garden, and though it was ultimately taken on by the city parks and gardens department, a team of around 20 volunteers still maintain it to this day.

Reynolds took a trip to the US to meet some of those who worked on the garden in its early days, transforming it from a derelict patch of land into what is now a lush space with mature magnolia and birch trees.

But the real origins of guerrilla gardening go back even further than that. At the turn of the 19th century, John Chapman planted apple orchards across swathes of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Ontario, Indiana and Illinois, earning him the nickname Johnny Appleseed and the designation of an American folk hero.

But even deeper into history we have Wigan-born Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, who in the 17th century tried to reclaim English land that had been seized and enclosed by private owners, tearing down fences and hedges and planting crops for the benefit of the locals.

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Guerrilla gardening is, of course, technically illegal. The land that is planted and tidied is usually in private ownership or in the control of the local authority. Those who practise guerrilla gardening have no rights to develop the land, or even be on it.

However, says Reynolds, prosecutions are almost unheard of, though he’s had one or two brushes with the authorities himself. Councils get twitchy about people carrying out this sort of thing without proper adherence to health and safety regulations. Reynolds has been confronted several times by council workers demanding that he stop what he’s doing, and on one occasion was almost arrested by the police who thought the tools he was carrying in the middle of the night were intended for more nefarious purposes than simply planting up an unloved grass verge.

But guerrilla gardening isn’t just the preserve of young, anarchistic activists (though Reynolds does admit that some people get involved because they love “the mischief of it”). He says over the course of all the digs he’s carried out with others, volunteers cross boundaries of age and social standing.

“It’s a very diverse bunch of people who get involved with these digs,” he says. “Some of them are keen gardeners, some are there for what I call the mischievous creativity of it. I’ve gardened with young people, old people, rich people, poor people.”

Indeed, even Saga Magazine, that venerable organ of our more senior demographic, ran a big feature on guerrilla gardening this year, exhorting its readers to get involved “if you’ve spotted a patch of ground or tatty raised beds that need some TLC”.

You might think that cash-strapped councils would actually be grateful for a bit of community help in keeping public areas nice and tidy, and in the 15 years since Reynolds first started his surreptitious gardening project, that has indeed become the case.

Just as the city of New York eventually embraced the work of the Green Guerrillas, so the mainstream here has started working with guerrilla gardeners, rather than fighting them. Incredible Edible, a scheme started in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, in 2008 to encourage people to grow food on patches of land, is now a nation-wide network with the support of major charities and organisations and has even received Lottery funding. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew has an outreach scheme called Grow Wild to encourage people to plant wildflowers and fungi in abandoned spaces.

Reynolds, now in his forties and living with a young family in Totnes, Devon, has found that his local council is now more willing to work with him on planting up derelict land, which is a far cry from when he started off in 2004 and was considered something of an enemy of the state… especially by one Boris Johnson.

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“I suppose Boris was my nemesis,” laughs Reynolds. While mayor of London, the current prime minister instituted a policy of road-widening and roundabout expansion works to improve transport in London, but which had the effect of wiping out grass verges and public green spaces. Reynolds vividly remembers confronting Johnson in the street and taking him to task about the vision to cover London with “vistas of stone”, to use one slogan of the time.

“It wasn’t even stone, it was mainly concrete,” says Reynolds. “It destroyed a lot of the good work many people had done.”

Whether Johnson remembers the encounter as vividly as Reynolds we don’t know, but it’s fair to say that since he started off gardening in the dead of night on a tiny piece of land that didn’t belong to him, Reynolds has certainly been at the forefront of a growing, global movement.

Reynolds reckons he’s performed guerrilla gardening activities in more than 40 locations, often just small patches of land he’s spotted while on his way to work. Perhaps the most memorable occasion was in Beirut, when he on impulse planted up a bit of dirt around a tree-pit on a pavement. He was on his honeymoon at the time.

In 2008, Reynolds published a book, On GuerrillaGardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries, is somewhat of a go-to guide that distils Richard’s years of experience. If you’re interested in a spot of guerrilla gardening yourself in the meantime, here are a few top tips from the man himself:

1. Find your target.

“You will be amazed how many little grubby patches of unloved public space there are. Neglected flower beds, concrete planters sprouting litter and untamed plants, bare plots of mud. Choose one close to home, perhaps you pass it on the way to the shops or work, and appoint yourself its parent. This will make it much easier to look after in the long term and reduce the risk of straying into a dangerous neighbourhood.”

2. Plan the mission.

“Make a date in the diary for an evening attack, when troublemaking busybodies are out of sight. Invite supportive friends, or perhaps enrol supportive strangers by announcing your attack.”

3. Find a local supply of plants.

“The cheaper the better. For city dwellers think local DIY stores, supermarkets and wholesalers. The cheapest plants are ones that are free. Sometimes garden centres will have spare plants to give you for the cause. Or befriend someone with a garden (you might even be lucky and have a garden yourself). Think of these private spaces as the training camps for harvesting seeds, cuttings and plants hardened for their big adventure in the wilds of public space.”

4. Choose plants for frontline battle.

“Think hardy – resistant to water shortages and the cold, and in some locations pedestrian trampling! These plants need to look after themselves a lot of the time. Think impactful – colour, evergreen foliage, scale. These plants need to really make a difference, for as much of the year as possible. In London, I used a lot of herbs like lavender and thyme, tulip bulbs, shrubs.”

5. Clean up after yourself.

“Take some plastic bags and bin liners, not only can they keep your feet clean, but they are essential for clearing up the detritus of war. Weeds, litter, flower pots, and pebbles need to be carried away. For gentle work reuse windblown carrier bags or for more serious gardening reuse compost bags or giant sacks from builder’s merchants. The thick plastic does not rip and you can lug a great deal in them to a nearby bin.”

6. Aftercare.

“One of the responsibilities of a guerrilla gardener is ongoing tendering. The guerrilla gardener must usually carry water and I have used petrol canisters, they are the perfect water-tight, efficiently-packed portable transportation. But it has caused passersby to ask if I am a nocturnal arsonist. Others have used old water bottles.”

For Richard Reynolds’ latest updates from the guerrilla gardening front line, follow him on Twitter or go to Facebook