Guerrilla Gardening

If you haven’t heard of the expression ‘Guerrilla Gardening’ is gardening on land you don’t own.

So why would you spend your time on this when you have got lots of other jobs in your new house?

Well in my case I lived on a corner block and had over 20m of colorbond fence at the side of the house.

Between this fence and the footpath there was this triangular piece of open space about 200mm wide at one and 5m wide at the other end.

The fence looked boring and within one week of it going up it got hit by graffiti.

The challenge was to prevent further graffitti and improve the look of the house from the side, without spending too much money.

I went for a fairly simple plan

  • Prickly native shrubs at the back.
  • An area of aganpanthus in the widest area
  • Native grasses and pig face at the front.

Although the shrubs were typically only 300mm high when they went it is interesting that no more graffitti occurred when people could see the area was being cared for.

What you can see in the photograph is after five years of growth. This has occurred in spite of minimal watering for the first year and nothing afterwards over a period of prolonged drought.

As for the mosaic its Che Guevara, probably the most famous Guerilla……………But I have changed the image you normally see on T shirts etc, to put a daisy on his hat and flowers around the bottom.

 

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