Guerilla Gardening

May, 21 2013 • 10:00

Posted inGreen Design

“Go green” is the motto of XXI century. Everyday we’re exposed to the healthy effect of advertising, public events, local recycling policies. Packaging gets lighter, companies strive to get their products a make-over to flaunt (existing or non-existing) eco-friendly features.

 

 

Sometimes they take the message too literally and we can admire home appliances painted in various shades of green, symbolizing different degrees of “eco-friendship”. There are initiatives, involving urban design for the most part, that takes the matter in a more ironic way: they go under the name of guerrilla gardening.

 


Its main purpose is to recover patches of land that are abandoned or neglected by planting crops or plants in order to beautify the area. This practice has political implications too, since it promotes re-consideration of land ownership among public authorities.

The “weapons” of guerrilla gardeners includes grenades. Well, sort of.

 

 

Copyright Kabloom

 

 

Glasgow based company Kabloom came up with an idea to plant a miniature garden even in areas difficult to reach with soil, seeds and shovel.

Seedboms are handmade agglomerates of organic, recycled, eco-friendly and biodegradable materials that contains seeds, shaped in the form of a hand grenade. It exist a variety of plants and flowers to choose among, depending on the appropriate season.

 

Copyright Anna Garforth

 

Moss graffiti is another practice of guerrilla gardening, although it involves wrecked walls instead of abandoned lands. This technique, as the name suggest, consist in performing the infamous street art where spray cans are substituted with fresh moss. How is that even possible? The answer is the following:

 

Copyright Anna Garforth

 

Inspired by guerrilla gardeners, Anna Garforth, London based multidisciplinary designer, created Mossenger, a living work of art which contains more or less the same ironic innuendo of Seedbom, i.e. beautifying and recover dilapidated public spaces through objects that turn upside down the meaning of their inspiration source: by substituting toxic chemicals with live beings, by seeding life instead of death.