Guerrilla Gardening
‘Liberating’ plants the alley-diving way
This time of year I think about all the bulbs that need to go into the ground, the cuttings that will need to be made later to propagate the rare and beautiful and my friend Graciella. For many, many years we were virtually inseparable. I suffered aches when I didn’t see her. We are still friends though thousands of miles separate us now and we’re older and far less juicy and venturesome.
She and I were poor youngish mothers together and the struggle was real but we worked hard not to focus on that. We stayed connected, helped each other and then eventually watched our kids separate from us and become their own people, either embracing the lessons we tried to teach them or flying off in directions that couldn’t be more opposite. That’s parenting, I guess. Or perhaps another sort of Guerrilla Gardening.
Fall and the leaves are leaving gold all over my garden. I don’t even bother to dig them in. The worms and insects chomp on them so the bacteria can get a hold, dissolving the leaves into the soil, releasing their nutrients. When I mow the too long grass I also don’t bother to rake. Graciella taught me all that. She also taught me not to chop the vegetables up too small. “Let them have their character and be recognizable.”
And then one day Graciella said, “Come on, let’s go Guerrilla Gardening the Alley Diving Way!”
We gathered up the children, supplied them with a backseat full of toys, PB and J sandwiches and bottles of water. Soon however, they drifted off to naptime in their car-seats. Graciella and I were masters at certain levels of planning.
Graciella taught me how to find all the best back alley’s to search out plants that had escaped their polite pathways and well-groomed beds to grow in rough soil and produce. Oh, did they produce! “We’ll have to come back here in the spring!” Graciella would enthuse when we’d find a dried up rose that still held the whispered remnants of beauty.
Then she’d gently clip a few rosehips for us to plant and thus share the chance of a resulting plant.
The bulbs and the ripe seeds were for the autumn. The cuttings had to wait for spring when the sap was sizzling. Cuttings were the best way she’d assure me but not often one we could use to propagate our liberated roses. Permissions for a couple of grubby, poor women who wanted to cut up your prize rose were a little thin on the ground. Hence the alley adventures down those forgotten overgrown paths between streets. Most people didn’t care much about their unconventional escapees.
Our budgets never had room for plants grown by other people and sold in clean containers or seeds, polite in their paper packets of promise. If we wanted beauty in our gardens and our lives we’d have to be stealthy.
We’d gather over-abundant lilies and other struggling self-smothering bulbs freeing the leftovers to stretch and grow and reach once again for sky. We’d take up rambunctious nasturtium seeds, a stray, smashed squash or two, spiny cucumbers threatening to overtake the pot-holed path and the seeds of all sorts and kinds of flowers, some forgotten and pretty unidentifiable whose promise might be fulfilled in riotous color the next spring.
Hollyhocks were a special favorite of mine because they were so lovely in all their many permutations but I also loved the yellow flowers that bloom prolifically in the crepuscular light. Many people think of them as weeds; oenothera missouriensis. But I thought they were so hopeful, cheerful and determined.
“Look,” we’d say to the kids, “see how these plants thrive even in the toughest situations!”
Later, we’d do our alley liberation runs when the children were in school and then later still after they left to their own pursuits. Eventually, our alley-diving morphed to mostly observation. “Oh look! That Veiltchenblau has literally taken over that swing! Remember when they first planted it? It was barely a twig.”
Then our adventures ended and I left the country for a very different life and other stories.
Graciella and I still speak on social media and we get to see how our faces are displaying the years. Recently, her beloved husband and my dear friend left us and we shared the shock and disbelief. We’re still making room for that grief. It takes up a lot of space.
Out of our seven children only one is not a gardener. She lives in a city apartment and works long hours. “I don’t have time for the outdoors” she says.
But she does still have the cutting from the Jade plant I gave her nearly 10 years ago. She lives in a climate that allows her to let it overflow its bounds on the balcony outside and boy, does it thrive! There are a few neighbors who also seem to have smaller versions of this plant edging their way out the windows along the alleyway behind her. It seems that Guerrilla Gardening is alive and well in the city.
