Guerilla gardening

THERE are those who complain, and then there are those who take action … and the residents of Kenya’s Kericho county fall squarely into the latter category. Kenyan roads are poorly maintained; in the rural areas it’s common to see roads that have more potholes than they do tarmac. Even when ‘repairs’ take place, they usually amount to sand or earth being filled in these craters, a half-hearted patchwork job that doesn’t last long.

Fed up, residents of Kericho County decided to make use of these potholes by planting banana trees in them, thus turning a virtually unnavigable road into a virtually unnavigable banana-tree studded road.

The exasperated roads and transport secretary Kipchumba Murkomen sent out a passionate appeal to the locals to stop their activities and asked for patience as the government was committed to improving the roads. In response, Kenyans reminded him that his party had campaigned on the slogan ‘We can’t eat roads’, which deprioritised spending on infrastructure and so he was in no position to complain if the people had decided to turn roads into avenues for food production.

This rather innovative and fairly practical method of protest is by no means limited to Kenya; Bryan Raymond, a resident of Fort Myers, Florida, was so tired of fixing the many recurring potholes on his street that he decided to draw the city authorities’ attention by planting a banana tree in the latest fissure. While this naturally generated a lot of media attention, it’s unclear whether it bore any fruit by leading to actual repairs being made.

Why not plant a banana tree in a pothole?

For others, their foray into pothole farming started as a safety measure. Alarmed by a growing pothole on the side of the road that was big enough for a child to fall into, New Orleans resident Ronnie Mackay decided to fill it with potting soil. Then an idea sprouted in his head: why not plant a few watermelon and corn seeds too? This attracted the attention of neighbours who pitched in to help. One local costume designer even made a miniature scarecrow who is perched above a traffic cone. And so, a pothole became a fun project for an entire neighbourhood.

Ron Finley, the ‘urban gangsta gardener’ of south-central Los Angeles, has taken guerrilla gardening, as it’s known, to another level. South-central LA is known not just for its poverty and high crime rate but, as Finley points out, for being a ‘food desert’: an area with limited or no access to fresh foods. There are plenty of liquor stores and fast and packaged processed food in the stores, notes Finley, but it’snearly impossible to find fresh fruit and vegetables. The result is obesity, malnutrition and a higher rate of easily preventable diet-related illnesses than in most other areas.

So Finley decided to plant a ‘food forest’ outside his home on a 45-metre by 3m stretch of overgrown land between the road and the footpath. Inviting volunteer gardeners to come and help tend the crops and fruit trees,Finley’s forest became a neighbourhood attraction and joint project. Given that the land is owned by the city, Finley was asked to remove the forest, but media attention and online petitions, along with some grassroots organising, forced the administration to not only give in but to support his plans to create more such forests — from which people in the neighbourhood are free to harvest — on empty lots across the city, and even in homeless shelters, where the residents help out by maintaining the gardens and, in return, get to eat fresh food.

Now, he runs the Ron Finley project “teaching communities how to transform food deserts into food sanctuaries, and teaching individuals how to regenerate their lands into creative business models”. Like he says: “Growing your own food is like printing your own money.”

But it’s not just about food and finances, it’s also about building resilient, cohesive communities. In Finley’s gardens, we see a model that isn’t just practical but also therapeutic and educational, especially for children.

Similarly, the concept of urban community gardening is picking up pace around the world and, on a recent visit to Canada, I got to see this project up close: small plots of unused city land are gardened collectively by a group of people from the local community, who work on shared or individual plots growing fruits, vegetable, flowers or whatever strikes their fancy. There are now such gardens in many Canadian and American cities, varying in size and complexity — from simple plants in wooden crates, to sprawling gardens. Even rooftops are being employed in dense urban settings where vacant land simply isn’t available.

The Covid pandemic and Ukraine war have reminded us how fragile global supply chains are and how critical food security is; perhaps the urban areas of Pakistan could benefit from similar projects … if only we can somehow keep the land mafia at bay.