Reading Response #6: website review: The Guerrilla Gardener

Guerrilla gardening is the type of thing that most people wouldn’t even think about in their usual day-to-day life. This website though, plants a new idea into anyone who is interested in public space and planting. The audience for this site would be fellow gardeners with a taste for some subversive ideas. I think that a very average gardener could be lured into the concept though. While there is a forum to provide support and logistics to would be guerrilla planters, the site also details enough other peoples stories to intrigue any average reader. This site has a purpose, a point to get across and a simple set of tools to do it.

The point is to beautify average, everyday, boring spaces and add some life to them, along with some vegetable producing potential. Legal or not, bare earth has no place in our landscape to this crowd.  The website was very compelling and effective in transmitting the ideas to the viewer. The addition of images and interesting stories, coupled with funny ideas like seed bombs and attache cases that have a drill and seed releaser to covertly plant seeds made the site more effective than it would have been as a simple text site.

One thing about this site that is really interesting is the effect the promoted actions can have on the environment, and local community. Environmentally, every plant that goes in the place of bare earth is a positive step. Bare earth drys out faster, releasing its nourishing water into the atmosphere. It has runoff problems from rain which it can’t absorb all of and it is generally not the nicest looking thing. By planting in these spaces around cities and towns, these people are beautifying the area, providing shade for insects and small animals to live in, preserving the water in the ground and absorbing carbon dioxide.

The niche filled by this kind of action is something you might not even realize exists. Generally gardens are taken for granted until the turn up bare. When budgets get tight, corners get cut and something like garden space is quick to fall by the wayside. The niche here left open by lack of concern or money is partially filled by this movement. There are pros and cons to every idea like this, but I personally think that pros outweigh the cons. Pros are things like absorption of carbon dioxide, shade, habitat, food and scenery while cons might be the utilization of private property without authorization, and the potential for pollutants to get into ground that is producing vegetables. Overall though, the concept is great and if I was still living in a big city with lots of dull, dry public dirt space, I would be inclined to become a guerrilla gardener myself.