Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book is inspirational. It’s a collection of stories about how people have created gardens in the midst of war. That includes soldiers on the Western Front building little gardens among their trenches when they got a moment of peace, or the ghettos of Eastern Europe during the Second World War. It shows the power and the need and the hunger for gardens as a respite from the horrors of war.
Your next book has an intriguing title, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.
Yes. This book is inspirational because it’s a collection of stories about how people have created gardens in the midst of war. That includes soldiers on the Western Front building little gardens among their trenches when they got a moment of peace, or the ghettos in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. It shows the power and the need and the hunger for gardens as a respite from the horrors of war.
Has this inspired you with your guerrilla gardening?
Very much so: even though I live in relatively peaceful South London, there are similarities. There may be lots of things people can do to try to find their humanity and escape from the horrors of one’s everyday life, whether that is fighting on the Western Front or fairly dreary monotonous living. But gardening is something that you can turn to simply with a bit of scrappy land in front of you and saving a few seeds from your food. Other escapes or calming activities are often more inaccessible. As a guerrilla gardener I am constantly trying to point out to people that the land is just there. That bit in your street or the traffic island is there. You might not have thought about it before, but you don’t need to escape on some rural vacation – just take advantage of what is around you.
Read full interview
Richard Reynolds, a strategic planner for an advertising agency, learnt how to garden from his mother and grandmother. Frustrated by the lack of a garden on his council estate in Elephant and Castle, one of South London’s toughest areas, in 2004 he decided to brighten up its many roundabouts.
