THE GRASS GETS GREENER

We’re always hearing about wars being waged and bag things happening.  Now the semantics remove the dirty word from actual guerrilla warfare and exchange it with Disneyland metaphors where 'fairy godmothers' suddenly bless you with a secret garden.

Urban beatification has been changing landscapes in our modern age with the emergence of graffiti in New York in the 1980s where the ‘bombing’ of subway trains used graphic fonts and explosive colours.  Artists such artists Basquiat and Banksy triggered a new wave in street creativity handing empowerment to disillusioned youth who begged to define themselves as present in a city too eager to forget them.  Yet despite its signal to start a creative movement, spray paint is harmful to the environment. 

Enter Guerrilla Gardening.

Westminister, London

Drive your car down an ugly street one day, go to bed and you could well wake up to see that space ‘ambushed’ with seamless street art to fit into nature with luscious foliage. These self-proclaimed ‘troops’ of gardeners enter like thieves in the night to completely beautify neglected land and buildings. From cities in New York to Berlin, Basel and Brisbane, they proudly adopt war metaphors to explain how they are making ‘orphaned land’ in cities and even country-sides, into new pop up works of art to last.

So much so that new collectives of gardeners are popping up giving themselves a moniker in true sub-cultural style attaching names to themselves, such as Public Space in Toronto.  Naomi Klein donates to their activism for the purchase of tools, receiving compost from the city, or soil and plants from green thumbers in the community.

That furrowed brow over city living and it's ugliness loses its crease, breathing a sigh of relief.  Now the epidemic of sprouting green thumbs all point to enlivened green spaces. 

Comments

[Heather]

That is a beautiful looking garden! It's amazing how just a few flowers and plants improved that plot of land by 1000%.

Keep it up ;)

[Scott]

If you're going to espouse the removal of junk mail and catalogs you need to do a better job researching how to contact companies. I'm a paying member and have easily found online methods for contacting various catalog companies and having my name removed from two catalogs which you stated required a paper letter and mailing.

Please, folks, let's practice what we preach here.