Nature and Constructed Space: Guerrilla Gardening

When you see an unfamiliar practice featured in a TV commercial, you immediately understand that you have caught onto this idea/practice/occurrence a little late in the game. Tonight I saw a Columbia commercial (you know, the company that makes outdoor/sporting gear) and they featured a group of "Guerrilla Gardeners" who are scoping out a parking lot with a small overgrown patch of land. This group of about 5 people hop a fence, tear out the existing weeds and plant new "native looking" plants. The commercial then goes on with some tagline about the "Greater Outdoors". It made me immediately think about our film project as we look to ideas of nature and constructed space.

I began to look into this practice and found that it seems to have started in the 1970s and is somewhat "popular" in England. I was able to watch this video of Londoners practicing guerrilla gardening. In this video, the main guy (Richard Reynolds) refers to the origins of the word "guerrilla" coming from Spanish villagers fighting for their land in the war. They see their task as the same: fighting for the land that is in their communities.

A small amount of research led me to an L.A. based group that has been getting some press this year for their work in organizing guerrilla gardening. They basically look for overgrown public spaces, plant native plants, then tend the garden and recruit others to help. They have also been doing some work with schools. I hope that we can feature this group in our film. You can check them out at www.laguerrillagardening.org

-Jessica