Andrew Paul

Getting Down And Dirty | Dustin Bajer, in plaid on the right, oversees his group of Guerrilla Gardeners dig up the curb side in preparation for a flower bed on 118th Avenue on May 9. Frost has since killed the flowers.

Mother Nature may have had some trouble getting her act together earlier this month, but that didn’t stop Edmonton’s local chapter of Guerrilla Gardeners from kicking off this year’s growing season.
Dressed in blue plaid with a pair of dirty work gloves hanging from his back pocket, Dustin Bajer was out recruiting volunteers in front of the Alberta Avenue Community Centre at the Bloomin’ Garden Show and Art Sale on a recent Saturday for a demonstration on the role community gardeners play in the city’s green space.

“What we want to do is bring some colour to the strip that doesn’t usually have a lot of colour,” Bajer says as he kneels down to inspect the native perennials he’s about to plant outside a construction site on the southwest corner of 118th Avenue and 92nd Street.

Guerrilla gardening is a growing global movement of citizens who want to address problems involving urban land use issues, including food security and sustainability, by undertaking gardening projects on plots of land that don’t necessarily belong to them.

Edmonton’s guerrilla gardening cell started last May as a group of well-intentioned idealists with no real resources or organization; just a shared feeling that they wanted to do something to green up the city.

“Last year this time we had nothing,” Bajer says.

Eventually the rag-tag crew mustered up some volunteers and scraped together a plan that saw their 2008 efforts climax with the planting of a an apple tree in the river valley.

Obviously last year wasn’t too productive for the group, but this year is shaping up to be a different story thanks to support from local community leagues.

The Guerrilla Gardeners were conducting a membership drive at Seedy Sunday, a seed exchange event at North Glenora Community Hall, in March when master composter Mark Stumpf-Allen approached them and asked if they’d like to combine forces to help with the revitalization of 118 Avenue. The Guerrilla Gardeners were sold on the idea and became part of a growing network of green-thumbed Edmontonians doing work all over the city.

“Just through this one little garden show, we’ve created this amazing network of people,” Stumpf-Allen says.

Like any underground movement, solidarity and a strong network are keys to survival, says Steve Frillman, the executive director of the Green Guerillas in New York City.

The NYC Green Guerillas started in 1973 as a grassroots movement under the direction of a painter named Liz Christy, who is credited with coining the term “green-aid” or “seed bombs.” Initially, Christy and her cohorts would fill condoms with wild flower seeds, water, and nutrients and toss the “green-aids” over fences into abandoned lots in order to beautify trashy plots of land in their neighbourhoods. Things began to grow, and the Green Guerrillas have since grown into a full-fledged NGO that oversees 600 community gardens in New York City.

“The original band of Green Guerillas in 1973 had no vision for that,” Frillman says. “Their vision was very similar to what the Guerrilla Gardeners up there in Canada are doing.”

The road to maturity of the Green Guerillas movement has been difficult, but the most successful community gardens in New York City have a plan for each growing season and methods of attracting enough volunteers to care for the gardens. “The biggest obstacle that faces anyone who wants to do urban gardening is sustainability,” Frillman says. “If [Bajer’s Guerrilla Gardeners] are making alliances with groups that are formed and have access to people and volunteers, then they’re probably already on their way to overcoming that challenge of sustainability.”
Not only are Edmonton’s Guerrilla Gardeners on the right track by teaming up with community leagues, they also have another advantage that the New York Green Guerrillas spent years working to achieve: cooperation with the city.
At the height of the New York Green Guerillas’ battle with City Hall, community gardeners were chaining themselves to trees and blocking bulldozers from destroying their little pieces of utopia in the cement cityscape.
Bajer agrees that guerrilla gardening is “about taking ownership of your community.” However, he says before he chains himself to a backhoe, he’d like to work alongside the city and has been discussing future projects with city officials.
These future projects include helping with the new Quarters development near 95th Street and Jasper Avenue, as well as looking into creating a food forest on an abandoned city lot that can’t be resold for development due to its precarious location on the edge of the river valley.

“It’s definitely speeding up and snowballing,” Bajer says about the future of his group.
Bajer might also be pleased to hear what John Helder, the principal of horticulture for the city, has to say about his band of green go-getters.

“We would like the Guerrilla Gardeners to help us and work with us,” Helder says. “Particularly in areas where there is a lot of community building and revitalization, we would just love to be involved so that we can help to make things easier for all concerned.”

There are currently 60 community gardens and well over 200 projects in the city’s Partners in Parks initiative — an initiative created in the 1980s that asked citizens to get involved in public green space maintenance after budget cuts threatened to deteriorate and leave much of Edmonton’s green space neglected.

For the Guerrilla Gardeners to work effectively within the programs that are already in operation, communication is paramount. “There’s nothing worse than someone putting effort into planting and then finding that for some reason it has to be removed,” Helder says.

Guerrilla gardening projects will be removed if they pose a safety hazard; examples would include tall shrubs blocking sightlines in traffic or plants with invasive root systems that could harm infrastructure. That’s a real concern: a northwest poplar’s root system can spread up to a kilometre and wreak havoc on sewage lines, the foundations of buildings and roadways.

Communicating with city gardeners can also ensure that the guerrillas’ efforts don’t fall into hostile environments, such as in neighbourhoods with ornery residents. Helder has run into instances where people have concerns about gardens on empty lots turning into neglected blights full of weeds because well-intentioned individuals either lose interest or simply don’t have the resources to commit to maintaining a proper garden.

“We try to work with communities,” Helder says, “so that they perceive community gardening or Partners in Parks activities as positive, and helping to build community and improve green spaces and open spaces that we have.”

Helder thinks Frillman and Stumf-Allen are right when they say the best way to get involved with long-term green projects is to speak with your local community league, as the city is more apt to deal with groups than individuals. After all, Bajer says, that’s the point. He hopes that the guerrilla gardening community will eventually turn into exactly that — a community, with resources and the ability to carry out successful large-scale green projects.

“I’m willing to take this as far as it will go,” he says.