On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gadening Without Boundaries by Richard Reynolds

From the Publisher

When Richard Reynolds began planting flowers secretly at night outside his tower block in South London he had no idea he was part of a growing global movement committed to combating the forces of neglect, land shortage and apathy towards public spaces. But his blog GuerrillaGardening.org attracted other guerrillas from around the world to share their experiences of the horticultural front line with him and become a focal point for guerrilla gardeners everywhere. On Guerrilla Gardening is a lively colourful treatise about why people illicitly cultivate land and how to do it. From discretely beautifying corners of Montreal to striving for green communal space in Berlin and sustainable food production in San Francisco, from small gestures of fun in Zurich to bold political statements in Brazil, cultivating land beyond your boundary is a battle many different people are fighting. Unearthed along the way are the movement’s notable historic advances by seventeenth century English radicals, a nineteenth century American entrepreneur and artists in 1970s New York. Reynolds has researched the subject with guerrilla gardeners from thirty different countries and compiles their advice on what to grow, how to cope with adverse environmental conditions, how to seed bomb effectively and to use propaganda to win support.

On Guerrilla Gardening gives entertaining inspiration, practical reference and no excuses for not getting out there and gardening.

Publishers Weekly

With the rallying cry, "Let's fight the filth with forks and flowers," this lighthearted guide is a seriously silly romp through the adventurous pastime of gardening other people's plots. Reynolds, after five months living in a 10-story tower block in London, missed gardening and began surreptitiously cultivating the planters in front of his building, gardening in the dead of night to avoid interference. He started a blog to share his delight in illicit gardening, and discovered he was part of an international movement. Reynolds draws inspiration from pioneers of the movement: New York community gardens built on vacant lots, dispossessed Honduran Chiquita workers who appropriated abandoned banana plantation land, and Gerrard Winstanley, founder of the short-lived but influential Diggers who, in the tumultuous year of 1649, planted beans and barley on public land in Surry, England, "that every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation." He borrows techniques from more infamous guerrillas such as Che Guevera and Mao Tse Tung ("the guerrilla 'must move with the fluidity of water and the ease of the blowing wind'"). Both a manifesto and a manual (tips include how to build seed bombs and deal with pests unique to the guerrilla form of gardening: authorities and landowners), the book delights with tales of exploits from the anarchic, artistic community of guerrilla gardeners.
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Emily-Jane Dawson - Library Journal

The practice of building gardens on abandoned or ignored land is called guerrilla gardening. People around the world use this method to beautify public space, build community, and grow their own food. Since guerrilla gardening is usually illicit-if not downright illegal-anyone interested in learning about it will benefit from a manual, and London-based Reynolds, an advertising planner who is also an activist and the founder of www.guerrillagardening.org, endeavors here to provide one. His handbook has two parts: a long, pedantic discourse on his own gardening philosophy, and a practical how-to section. He peppers the text with stories from clandestine gardeners around the world (e.g., New York's Green Guerrillas), which ought to illustrate the breadth of accomplishment possible with this pastime but instead sound preachy and trite. Reynolds's leaden prose is the book's chief fault-in particular, the book suffers from awkward syntax, stale vocabulary, and a sophomoric tone. Most of the practical information and some of the theory are useful, but Reynolds's presentation is so poor that it is an optional purchase at best. A better choice is David Tracey's eloquent Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto.

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