True confession: I am a bit of an anarchist at heart, and have always loved something my dear friend, Mia, calls "guerrilla gardening." For me and a few choice partners in crime during college, guerrilla gardening meant going out into the city under the cover of night with scissors and a shopping bag and making our week's selections from the various concrete planters of tulips and daffodils that dot the well-kept sidewalks of Washington, D.C.'s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. I loved to have fresh flowers in my dorm room, but was too thrifty to buy them from the florist, and besides, stealing them was much more fun.
My sense of civic responsibility trumped my passion for guerilla gardening as I grew older, and now I get my (admittedly non-organic) fix from the local green grocer (though from time to time I will still, y’know, pinch an apple blossom or two to tuck behind my ear from a public tree, which is petty larceny by comparison).
But yesterday in Cottage Living magazine, I read about a way of guerilla gardening that weds civil disobedience with civic pride: making green grenades!
Green grenades are basically water balloons with a bunch of flower seeds funnelled in. In fact, that's exactly what they are. To make one, get a bunch of cheap balloons from the 99-cent store, a bunch of non-invasive annuals seeds, and a few friends who share your anarchism-for-civic-beauty attitude. Then, haul your loot to an empty lot and hurl 'em! The article says to clean up the balloon mess afterwards, which would be the responsible thing to do next, of course.
What would be good seeds for green grenades? I'm not an expert on this, and please post a comment if I'm wrong or if you have other suggestions, but I think cosmos, calendula, zinnias, asters, sunflowers, snapdragons, and marigolds might be good choices: tall(ish) and showy and hearty enough to actually grow in random plots of earth without becoming a nightmare for someone who ends up wanting to do something later with the land.
I love this idea and hope if you do it you'll send us a picture of the flowers if and when they come up!
But if anyone catches you at your guerilla gardening, it wasn't me who told you 'bout it...
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1 comment:
This is a great idea! You go girl...If I didn't live in one of the most bucolic places on earth already, I'd arm myself to the teeth with green grenades!
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