'I call it botanarchy': The Hackney guerrilla gardener bringing power to the people

Anarchism gets a bad rep. In the popular imagination, anarchists dress in black, they smash windows and hurl firebombs at police. Or else, they are young social misfits with green hair and too many piercings. Often they are both.

But what if anarchy could be beautiful, what if it could bring local communities together planting flowers in the streets? For Ellen Miles, the new doyenne of guerrilla gardening, it is. “I call it botanarchy,” she says.

With trowel in one hand and watering can in the other, Miles is inspiring young people to take up rakes and hoes, not to wave them at the gates of Downing Street, but to till the soil in the neglected flower beds and green patches of their streets and estates.

And in so doing, she says, they are not just brightening up the concrete vistas of urban cityscapes, but beginning the essential adaptations industrialised societies need to make to preserve biodiversity and become more resilient to global heating – and all the while challenging the liberal capitalist state.

“Guerrilla gardening is the practice of planting in public spaces in your neighbourhood” she says on a humid summer afternoon, walking between outlaw flower beds in Hackney, east London.

“And that’s how I define it … because, for me, it’s all about community ownership and belonging, and I think we have a right to cultivate these spaces in the areas we call home – and a responsibility to, as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/i-call-it-botanarchy-the-hackney-guerrilla-gardener-bringing-power-to-the-people

Great stuff! Let's all do a little of this if we can....