Reynolds has helped build 28 gardens around London over the last four years. Unlike many guerrillas I spoke to, he is not building big community gardens, growing food or hijacking neglected, privately owned land to critique the capitalist system. Instead, he is planting strictly ornamental arrangements of flowers and shrubs on roundabouts, roadsides, tree pits and other slivers of public land that have fallen into disrepair. He is fundamentally an aesthete. And at first glance, there\u2019s a confounding innocence to it all. Yet Reynolds has managed to stir controversy and, very recently, found himself surrounded by the police. He is quickly becoming both a subculture celebrity (Adidas sent him a treatment for a guerrilla-gardening-themed ad campaign) and a public intellectual, challenging ideas about what it means to live in a city \u2014 simply by decorating one.<\/p>\n
Reynolds says that he has gardened with several hundred guerrillas in London and now hears of actions he had nothing to do with planning. A few weeks before the dig in Hoxton, a new acquaintance asked for his help reforming a muddy median near Camden\u2019s Hawley Arms pub \u2014 a famed Amy Winehouse haunt that burned in a huge fire in February. \u201cIt\u2019s been described here, very inappropriately, as the 9\/11 of the indie world,\u201d Reynolds told me. In the spirit of healing, guerrillas replanted the area with hedging donated by a woman in Notting Hill. (Reynolds gets frequent donations of plants and cash and says he spent about $1,400 of his own money on gardening last year.) They planned to prune the hedges into topiary the shape of Winehouse\u2019s hairdo.<\/p>\n
![\"richard](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/richard-reynolds.jpg\" "\\"richard")
Richard Reynolds, author of \u201cOn Guerrilla Gardening.\u201d Despite the revolutionary trappings of his movement, Reynolds\u2019s aims are primarily aesthetic.<\/p><\/div>\n
Reynolds calls such neglected plots \u201corphaned land.\u201d Sometimes, as is the case with the plot in Hoxton, each relevant city agency assumes another one is responsible for the upkeep of a particular patch. Orphaned land is an abundant, underutilized resource in the postindustrial city, as is the creative energy of people like Reynolds who would love to garden but can\u2019t afford land of their own. That is, even in cities where land is scarce and expensive, substantial amounts of it are left derelict. Thus, guerrilla gardening mobilizes gardeners without land to take over land without gardeners. A space that previously meant nothing to anyone is turned into \u201ca catalyst for community conversation,\u201d Reynolds says, generating a feeling of shared ownership of the city.<\/p>\n
By now, most of his energy is devoted to looking after about a half-dozen established plots, keeping his work there from reverting into hives of overgrowth and litter. He and his girlfriend, Lyla Patel, often tidy up or weed at night, on their way home from pubs and parties. Patel, who is 27 and grew up in London, told me that the only times strangers have ever struck up conversations with her on the street are when she\u2019s gardening.<\/p>\n
Patel and I took the tube to Hoxton together since Reynolds\u2019s car was packed with plants. She lovingly described him as easily impassioned and distracted \u2014 a classic dilettante, if he weren\u2019t also an incorrigible overachiever about everything. Reynolds and his brother were briefly signed to a record label as an electronic-music duo, and along with a friend, he silkscreens and sells a line of T-shirts. One afternoon, he told me he was thinking about starting a one-man painting-and-decorating business to earn extra cash. The next day, he had a Web site up and his first job, redoing a bathroom.+<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s always something to keep him occupied, and stressed,\u201d Patel explained. \u201cHe pressures himself. He\u2019s a perfectionist. But people are always proud of their gardens when they\u2019ve worked hard on them. It\u2019s just, Richard\u2019s gardens are all over the city.\u201d She smiled. \u201cAnd he is a show-off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christopher Woodward, director of London\u2019s Museum of Garden History, told me that Reynolds \u201cis a provocateur. He\u2019s asking questions.\u201d The museum recently held a party for Reynolds\u2019s book, and late last month, it staged a debate among Reynolds, an academic and a landscape architect about guerrilla gardening and changing attitudes toward public space. \u201cThere is a real thirst to bring nature and the seasons back into the concrete city,\u201d Woodward said. \u201cRichard is one of a number of provocative, creative people in gardens, in horticulture, in public parks, who are genuinely changing the approach.\u201d As it happens, Woodward took part in his first guerrilla action the week before we spoke, scattering sunflower seeds and tending to a downed tree. \u201cWe lifted the tree back up, and we all felt wonderful,\u201d he told me. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely a real kick, isn\u2019t there, to digging up public land?\u201d<\/p>\n
In Hoxton, after an hour of filth-clearing, a promising bed of black soil started to materialize. \u201cWe\u2019ve broken the back of it,\u201d Reynolds said. He turned up some dirt with a pitchfork to check its depth. \u201cThe California poppy will absolutely love it,\u201d he announced. Then, raising his voice, he directed everyone: \u201cBut let\u2019s not do any more digging. I was just curious. Patience!\u201d<\/p>\n
Reynolds grew up<\/strong> gardening with his family in Devon and at boarding school in Exeter, where, even at age 8, he took over the shoddy plots of his less-enthusiastic classmates. After Oxford, he settled in the South London neighborhood of Elephant and Castle. He found a flat in a drab, concrete high-rise called Perronet House \u2014 a building managed by the borough government. It was the first time he\u2019d lived in a place without a garden or even window boxes. So he set his sights on the raised-brick flower beds out front, about 80 feet across. A few willful periwinkle plants poked out of the trash and construction scrap.
\n![\"guerilla](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/guerilla-gardening2.jpg\" "\\"guerilla")
<\/p>\nIn the fall of 2004, unsure if anyone would mind, Reynolds began yanking weeds from the beds in the middle of the night. He planted a few clippings from his mother\u2019s garden and started blogging his experiment. Gradually, he built the space into a lively garden: \u201ca quite ambitious\u201d take, he says, on the traditional herbaceous border style. (He has entered the Perronet House beds in the \u201cfront garden\u201d category of a borough-sponsored competition intended for private homeowners.) Soon, he started venturing farther into the neighborhood to remake other orphaned parcels. \u201cI was doing it for myself,\u201d he says. \u201cI was doing it because I wanted to garden, and I was ashamed of the grottiness of the area I lived in. It was plain and simple selfish middle-class pride.\u201d<\/p>\n
The following year, the British news media discovered Reynolds\u2019s blog. A burst of flattering coverage began. He had just been laid off from an advertising firm and now had the time, and the celebrity, to coordinate volunteers to create grander gardens in larger spaces. Over four nights in 2006, a total of 80 guerrillas converted a roughly 400-foot-long triangular median of unruly grass south of Westminster Bridge into what Reynolds now calls \u201cour flagship\u201d: an expansive fit of euphorbia and helleborus, as well as small willow, cherry and dogwood trees, all vaulting from a blanket of lavender. Once a year, guerrillas harvest the lavender and sew it into little pillows, which are sold to support more gardening. When Reynolds took me by one afternoon, the deep-red tulips had just opened, and he took pictures fervently for his blog. He uses many red plants, he said, and tries to capture them for the blog with a red double-decker bus or red phone booth in the background. \u201cRed is very much London\u2019s color,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
Reynolds still freelances in advertising and is compulsively fascinated by the way things are marketed. He is keenly aware of how politicized, how anti-establishment, plants are becoming \u2014 even lawful ones. \u201cThey\u2019re being venerated,\u201d he says, as \u201ca solution\u201d to many of society\u2019s problems. Plants offset carbon emissions. They can fuel our cars. Community gardens become places to sit with friends in cities where doing so has increasingly necessitated buying a cappuccino. Urban agriculture promotes food security or supplies fresh vegetables to poor neighborhoods lacking grocery stores. Recently, the architect Fritz Haeg has been campaigning to replace American front lawns with crops, calling his new book, \u201cEdible Estates,\u201d \u201ca radical intervention\u201d against our \u201crepressive streets of zombie lawn-lined monotony.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says \u201ctasted dirty,\u201d Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature\u2019s order; he gladly plants invasive species if they\u2019re aesthetically appropriate to the setting. Instead, he seems to focus on guerrilla gardening as a socially subversive phenomenon, breaking us out of the unconstructive role we\u2019ve cast ourselves in as citizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s this feeling that someone\u2019s going to be doing it for us,\u201d he told me. We respect public space by not degrading it: not littering, not vandalizing. But we rarely consider what we might contribute to it. Consequently, the common areas of our cities wind up belonging to none of us rather than to all of us equally. As Andy Brown, a guerrilla gardener in Toronto, puts it: \u201cIf it makes sense to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls of your living room, it makes sense to put a fresh coat of flowers on your neighborhood, because they\u2019re both places you live in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reynolds accepts that cities can realistically spend only so much on horticulture. \u201cWe\u2019re their solution to a lack of funding,\u201d he told me. More important, he argues, guerrillas simply do some jobs better than government. Guerrillas are fleeter. They\u2019re not bound up in safety regulations, forced to drag around \u201cMen at Work\u201d signs or to suffer through volunteer trainings or write grant proposals like legitimate volunteers. Several guerrillas told me they\u2019re particularly proud to be bringing more imaginative plant combinations to roadsides than the city does, more artistry.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up singing in a cathedral where every little surface of all the medieval walls was carved in,\u201d Reynolds said. \u201cIt looked like a place that was really special to people \u2014 lived in and loved.\u201d His gardening is meant to communicate the same affectionate and collaborative investment in London. \u201cI\u2019m not against the state,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m not an anarchist. I accept society more or less as it is. But there are chinks, there are flaws, there are anomalies in it. There are things that get overlooked, and I think guerrilla gardening can be a solution to that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s sort of the geek in me that says, Oh, no, hang on a minute,\u201d he later added. \u201cLet\u2019s look at this again. Let\u2019s reassess this. This could be so much better with a bit of imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since he went public<\/strong>, Reynolds\u2019s run-ins with municipal authorities have been infrequent but strange. Last summer, after the London Borough of Southwark suddenly decided to resume its own upkeep of the Perronet House beds, encroaching on Reynolds\u2019s turf, Reynolds arranged to meet the borough\u2019s horticulturists to discuss the issue. \u201cThey were all wearing dark sunglasses,\u201d he says, and refused his invitation to come up to his flat and talk over tea. At one point, he says, they threatened to tear up his entire garden and generally behaved like \u201csmall-minded, stupid, paranoid, negative, aggressive idiots.\u201d<\/p>\nEventually, Reynolds rallied the building\u2019s residents behind him and was given verbal permission to continue gardening outside Perronet House \u2014 and there only. The encounter persuaded him that hiding his identity, as many guerrillas do, would be a mistake, feeding the assumption that he was doing something destructive. Being upfront about his intentions seems to defuse conflict with authorities, he says, if only because it so thoroughly confuses them.<\/p>\n
The week after I left London, however, a troupe of guerrillas were suddenly confronted by more than a half-dozen police officers while refurbishing a traffic circle outside Reynolds\u2019s building. Reynolds was as forthcoming as ever (\u201cI\u2019ve put that flower bed in beneath those railings,\u201d he tells the police in a video of the incident, laying it all on the table, \u201cand we\u2019ve got some nice forget-me-nots going there\u201d) but was nevertheless threatened with arrest for \u201ccriminal damage.\u201d The guerrillas retreated to his flat, where they spent an hour and a half with a bottle of red wine. Then, when the coast seemed clear, they began scampering out, two at a time, carrying purple primrose to finish the job.<\/p>\n
Councillor David Noakes, who represents Reynolds\u2019s ward in the London Borough of Southwark, told me: \u201cGenerally I\u2019m supportive of what Richard\u2019s doing. He\u2019s providing an example of the kind of member of a community that we want.\u201d And yet, Noakes stressed, guerrillas put the council in a complicated position. Though the borough wants to \u201caccommodate\u201d guerrilla gardening, it must also protect the health and safety of the public and limit its own liability to lawsuits. \u201cI can understand that, to Richard, the council must sometimes appear unnecessarily bureaucratic and very conflicting in its views,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very unusual issue for the council. Unfortunately, there aren\u2019t a lot of Richard Reynoldses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, Reynolds\u2019s most frequent irritants and obstacles are more mundane. His plants are sometimes stolen. In winter, they are singed by salt used to de-ice roads. At St. George\u2019s Circus, in a traffic island he has cultivated for three years, Reynolds has been engaged in a long duel with jaywalkers who regularly cut through his garden. Initially, he blocked them with a laurel hedge. They barged through it. So earlier this year, guerrillas installed \u201cThe Pebbly Concession to Suicidal Tramplers,\u201d a narrow path through the garden to channel and contain the intruders. Yet when Reynolds took me by St. George\u2019s Circus the day before the Hoxton dig, the place was a disaster.<\/p>\n
![\"guerrilla](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/guerrilla-gardening4.jpg\" "\\"guerrilla")
The city was digging up water mains and had fenced off much of the island, blocking the Pebbly Concession. \u201cThe path is completely pointless now,\u201d Reynolds whined. Jaywalkers had started to wear away a new trail, through some lavender and dangerously close to his azaleas. As we stood there, two kids in buzz cuts and hoodies came stamping through behind us.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot do that, please!\u201d Reynolds suddenly yelped. \u201cGet off my flower bed! You\u2019ve just destroyed all the plants!\u201d He was screaming now. \u201cWalk on the pavement!\u201d he said, adding an expletive.<\/p>\n
The kids didn\u2019t care. One swore back at him as he passed, and an elderly man with a walker approached from the same direction. \u201cOh, now he\u2019s coming along with his walker,\u201d Reynolds moaned. \u201cWhat\u2019s he going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n
Traffic swept around the circle. Reynolds paced and complained \u2014 the perfectionist beset by imperfections, the guerrilla gardener versus the guerrilla pedestrians, each refusing to stay within the lines. Soon he found one of the road crew\u2019s striped barriers lying in his heather. He fixed the plank across the trail, leaning it against a cabbage palm: a blockade. He was back to being cheerful, impressed by his cleverness. He stepped back to look at it. Then he photographed it for his blog.<\/p>\n
What other malfunctions<\/strong> of the modern city could autonomous activists fix? How far can guerrilla urbanism go?<\/p>\nIn his book, Reynolds describes a group of London anarchists who engaged in \u201cguerrilla benching,\u201d installing their own wooden benches on sidewalks when a local government began removing benches from public space. In France, guerrilla repairmen built a clandestine workshop under the dome of the Panth\u00e9on and, over the next year, refurbished its clock. Recently, guerrilla knitters in New York and elsewhere have been wrapping traffic light poles in colorful, leg-warmer-like cozies.<\/p>\n
Still, Reynolds acknowledges that with gardening \u2014 particularly the kind of persnickety ornamental gardens he\u2019s so passionate about \u2014 he happens to have stumbled into a realm of guerrilla restoration that is almost perfectly unthreatening to everyone. People generally agree that, unlike squatters or graffiti, tulips and rosemary are beneficial appropriations of public space; they are pretty, particularly if they spring from a beer-sodden trench of weeds. In fact, a spokeswoman for the London Borough of Hackney, the borough in which the Hoxton roundabout is located, couldn\u2019t readily tell me whether what Reynolds and his troops did there is technically illegal. \u201cGosh, I don\u2019t know,\u201d she said. \u201cEnvironmental vandalism would be illegal, but it\u2019s hard to argue that gardening is vandalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even the owner of the neighboring pub who stormed out to have a word with Reynolds that night tried to stress, again and again, that he had absolutely no problem with guerrilla gardening; he\u2019s all for flowers. But the borough had been reprimanding him about the noisy crowds outside his bar, and he resented the gardeners for adding to the volume and endangering his business. Reynolds superciliously explained that they were actually helping his business \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019re gentrifying the area, making it a more desirable place to hang out!\u201d as he put it to me \u2014 infuriating the barman even more. But before long, everyone was back to work, unsheathing the boxwood from its garbage bags. A car slowed through the intersection, and from the crowded back seat a man hollered: \u201cARE YOU GUERRILLAS?\u201d \u2014 enunciating each word as if he were shouting to natives from the bow of his galleon. When Patel and Reynolds called out \u201cYes\u201d in unison, thumbs shot up around the car.<\/p>\n
Soon packets of poppy seeds \u2014 remainders of a Gardens Illustrated promotion donated by the magazine \u2014 were being torn open and poured into a big red bucket. A young woman in a raincoat stopped to thank Reynolds for \u201cthe difference you\u2019ve made in London and in the landscape\u201d and to ask him if there was any chance he\u2019d visit her neighborhood. \u201cIt\u2019s really bad, really bad up there,\u201d she said, like a weary citizen in a Marvel comic book. \u201cMy aim,\u201d he told her, \u201cis to encourage people to take the same approach that we have, and just get out and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
By 10:30, two and a half hours after the guerrillas descended on that scrappy shred of land, there was indisputably a garden there. A double row of ivy ran behind the fence and, behind it, flanked by clumps of daisies, boxwood enclosed the butterfly bush. Reynolds raked up. Then, when no one was looking, he unceremoniously shook out the bucket of poppy seeds around the edges. \u201cDone,\u201d he told Patel. \u201cIt\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n
[Via NYTimes.com<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just after sunset on one of the first mild nights of spring, Richard Reynolds parked his hatchback near a traffic circle in the London neighborhood of Hoxton. Tied to his roof were a potted honeysuckle and a dozen box hedge plants, spilling out of garbage bags. Trays of bright white Paris daisies filled the trunk, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/guerrilla-gardening.jpg\" "\\"guerrilla-gardening\\"")
Just after sunset on one of the first mild nights of spring, Richard Reynolds parked his hatchback near a traffic circle in the London neighborhood of Hoxton. Tied to his roof were a potted honeysuckle and a dozen box hedge plants, spilling out of garbage bags. Trays of bright white Paris daisies filled the trunk, and cartons of variegated ivy were wedged in the passenger seat. Hipsters drank indifferently outside a nearby pub.<\/p>\n![\"guerrilla](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/guerrilla-gardening3.jpg\" "\\"guerrilla")
Reynolds is 30, long-limbed and willowy, with a floppy pile of dark curls. For the next several hours, as he and his troops reclaimed this lost crumb of London, people \u2014 young and old, lucid and drunk \u2014 would pause on the sidewalk to stare or cheer them on. Many asked if this was what they suspected it must be: the vaguely political, very radical thing they\u2019ve heard is happening around the city. And this being artsy Hoxton \u2014 \u201cthe Williamsburg of London,\u201d as one American ex-pat put it to me \u2014 what seemed like every third passerby photographed the spectacle for his blog.<\/p>\n