To guerilla garden, you must be comfortable jumping the fence marked private. In other words, banish what you understand ‘ownership’ to mean. For this reason, it can be a precarious practice. You work in the shadows, sometimes in silence, against the law and the assault of the weather. You grit your teeth and contend with failed crops, slug infestations, and every gardener’s greatest foil - catshit. 

To guerilla garden you cultivate land you have no legal right to be on. You might garden as a form of protest, to detoxify the soil and encourage bees, or to make your surroundings beautiful. To guerilla garden is to leave the land in better condition than how you found it.

It was under these precepts that I began gardening Plot A last winter as part of a food solidarity group, with the aim of growing food for donation. The local food banks near Plot A, situated on Glasgow’s south side, had expressed a need for fresh fruit and vegetables. It seemed possible, with our group’s combined expertise in some cases, and sheer foolhardy willingness in others, to grow enough for ourselves and the community. 

Plot A has a secret garden effect. From the street you would miss the narrow gap, the slim slip of an alley with a meandering path, that leads you to a plot just over half the size of a football field. The view from the tenements that wedge it in is, however, explicit. Despite one minor gripe about a particularly ugly bit of tarpaulin we were using to capture water, our relationship with the neighbours who overlook the garden has been overwhelmingly positive. Several of the neighbours are gardeners and join our regular Sunday meet-ups to prepare beds, weed, or tinker away at any DIY project they fancy. 

There were other precedents for gardening on Plot A. It was an opportunity to explore concepts like borderless gardens, or moon-growing, as well as creating a space for casual learning. I have since learnt how to dismember a pallet and build it into a flower bed. I have learnt how to companion-plant; a technique involving planting two different mutually
 beneficial species side-by-side. 

While precarious, urban growing in this manner is not unusual, or without controversy. In a 2014 article published by the Guardian, gardener and artist Martin Allen criticises guerilla gardening, calling it a ‘self-centered’ response to urban deprivation. According to Allen, gardening practices which are monitored in established growing spaces are preferential, and yield to maximum community and environmental benefit, rather than the outlawish activities of guerilla gardeners. 

Allen’s preference is the allotment, or private garden, which he renders as the ‘power of playing the system’. Indeed, seed-bombing a busy junction could be nothing more than ‘a sticking plaster for poor urban horticulture’, but waiting 18 months for an allotment you can barely afford is anything but powerful. Perhaps it’s the martial metaphors he can’t get behind, though ‘guerilla’ and the violence it implies extends only to elements of mobility, secrecy and surprise which are fundamental to warfare as they are to this sort of gardening. Beyond that, the comparison withers - you’re unlikely to encounter anything more ferocious than a bag of ageing manure. 

For the most part, attitudes towards illicit gardening have changed. On the international stage, a.k.a Youtube, guerilla gardeners like Ron Finely, an L.A. resident and founder of The Ron Finley Project, have demonstrated the need for and success of alternative urban growing to counter obesity and malnutrition. His project highlights how climate crisis, poor urban planning and overstretched council budgets have created ‘food deserts’; similarly in the UK, more than a million people live without cheap and quick access to fresh fruit and veg, while Covid-19 has accounted for a 108% rise in people needing emergency food parcels. Although it shimmers with affect, Finley’s TEDtalk punchline: ‘Food is the problem and the solution’ chimes with the global priorities for COP26, as well as the intentions for cultivating Plot A.

Without a private garden, allotment or community growing space available to you, ‘playing the system’ is impossible -  especially when that system is biased against you. What frustrated Finley and other guerilla gardeners like him is despite a scarcity of both food and an authorised growing space available for free, urban environments can be disarmingly empty. ‘Stalled land’, which private developers or local authorities are slow to develop, accounts for much of this urban barrenness. Lingering patches of sad grass between buildings and vacant lots only worsen this problem.

Some councils are responding proactively to this municipal loophole. In Glasgow you can apply for a temporary permit to set-up community projects on stalled land, but there is no guarantee you’ll be able to garden on them. Mostly though, privately owned sites like Plot A are more intensely surveilled, and growing on them is courting the threat of imminent eviction, or even ruination. Plot A had once been an established community space - run by local gardeners and artists, which the landowner did not have planning permission to build on. While previously content to yacht in Monaco, the landowner decided to destroy the raised beds and dismember existing artworks to prevent activity on the land. From what we have been able to tell, he has encouraged fly-tipping on the site, which in turn has contaminated the soil and prevented us from gardening directly in the ground. 

Another reason why guerilla gardening is both temporary and precarious is how visible an activity it is. While comparisons can be made to squatting, it is far less secretive. Occupation is often carried out in full view, and in some cases there is more of an emphasis on wider community participation. Some growing sites, such as De Kaskantine in Amsterdam, are deliberately modelled as time-sensitive, shape-shifting sites. Operating out of shipping containers on temporarily available land, this method of working encourages resource sharing and solution-building, with a vision of a green city in mind. As a transportable garden, it enriches sites all over the city. Projects like De Kaskantine help to spread knowledge and offer opportunities for growing, especially if those areas are deprived of greenery and the material resources to set up a garden. What’s more, the shape-shifting, repetitive manner in which it is organised allows the collective to refine the process of building, growing, educating and dismantling. By pitching up in different parts of the city, the collective can expand and enrich its network, and provide an important opportunity to socialise with green-fingered folk. 

Loneliness, as much as activism, drew me to Plot A. In fact, at the time, it could be said that I was initially more hungry for friendship. I had just moved to the city and the lockdown had made it difficult to meet new people. Through Plot A, even small-talk, barely audible through our facemasks, was enough to feel connected. Guerilla gardening also brought me into a body I have had difficulty caring about. I recognise this in other gardeners too; artist Derek Jarman, for example, lived and worked with the garden as an abiding motif for healing. In his diary ‘Modern Nature’, he describes tending to his garden in Dungeness - a constant battle against the burning, salty wind, the shifting, quick-sand effect of the shingle - in a way that mirrors the process of tending to his body as he suffered with HIV. 

Guerilla gardening, or even urban growing in more official spaces, is still considered a fringe or luxury activity for the white middle-classes, Gen X activists, and old-school crusties. But I maintain that it is neither simplistic nor naive to declare that urban growing is an operable solution to food scarcity, malnutrition, loneliness and poor mental health. And, if Plot A has taught me anything, it is to resist the idea that a garden at the end of every street is utopian, and that the prospect of my neighbours being fed properly is a dream. 

The real name and exact location of Plot A has been changed to protect the anonymity of the growers, and the sustainability of the site.