Toronto Green Community is going to be participating in an event on October 8th called Eat-In Ontario at Queen’s Park. This event is being put on by FoodShare, and is a part of their Field to Table Schools program, which works on developing curriculum for all grade levels to promote food literacy and understanding of the social and environmental issues related to food. We will be presenting on Guerrilla Gardening: gardening in unconventional spaces in the city with or without formal permission. My research on this topic led me to this fantastic book by David Tracey, Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto.
The use of the word manualfesto made me a little nervous at first. I felt like the might be an out of touch, unrealistic book that gave a humourless account of the politics of counterculture, with a few flower references thrown in for good measure. In reality, David Tracey’s years as a journalist give him an extremely readable style, and he manages to focus on both the politics and practice of guerrilla gardening without one overshadowing the other.
The book opens with an introduction to the history of and intention behind guerrilla gardening and discusses its capacity to help people re-imagine the city; learning how space can be used in new and creative ways. Tracey discusses ways to deal with the illegal nature of much guerrilla gardening and discusses ways to legitimize projects both before and after they are begun. His emphasis is on the fun in guerrilla gardening, and the fact that participating in these kinds of projects is a way to address and move beyond depressing environmental realities, not to get bogged down in them. Enjoying the process is so important that Tracey mentions it twice in his list of reasons to Guerrilla Garden, saying:
“Yes, the earth is in drastic shape, and OK, we’re all going to die, but no, we will not in the meantime be driven into becoming dour, hand-wringing, finger-wagging scolds. We will have fun and we will save the planet at the same time. Why? As pursuits they go well together.”
Guerrilla Gardening A Manualfesto is a funny and inspiring book that describes all different aspects of Guerrilla Gardening from seed bombs to midnight planting parties to community orchards and gives realistic project advice: landscape design tips, fast growing wildflowers, tools to use when you’re travelling light and what to say if you get stopped – “oops” being the #1 answer. For anyone interested in merging gardening and creativity in any way this book can be an inspiration, and for converts to Guerrilla Gardening( myself included) it lives up to its name, being a coherent, how-to manifesto.
down the garden path 