Guerrilla Gardening on BBC Southern Counties

I've just done a live interview over the phone with Charlie Crocker for BBC Southern Counties Radio, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio Solent, BBC Radio Oxford and BBC Radio Berkshire which went out across Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire about Guerrilla Gardening, which was fun although nerve racking! Thank you to the charming Lydia who sorted it out...

Talk about things that come back to haunt you... my status as a 'Guerrilla Gardening Guru' stems back to 1989 when I was asked to write an article for Green Anarchist magazine about allotments and guerrilla gardening- you can read it here if you want- consequently this got recycled a few years later by some Reclaim the Streets folks for a spoof newspaper they put together around the events of mayday 2000, then Grauniard journalist Lucy Seigel mentioned me in her book Green Living in the Urban Jungle. She also gave our Permaculture Courses a plug in the Observer which was nice, but does seem to have set me up as being some sort of authority on the subject! I even got described as the 'original UK Guerrilla gardener', although I think that honour should perhaps be reserved for Gerard Winstanley and the 1649 Diggers of St Georges Hill. However, Guerrilla Gardening and land squatting does have a long and venerable tradition, and hopefully our small efforts at Moon Corner, a previously unloved and littered spot in Leigh on Sea not too far from the Grand Hotel that was cleared by local people and made into a beautiful micro-community garden are a worthy footnote in that history (or should that be herstory as, apart from the Woodcraft Folk kids who got involved, the majority of the volunteers who cleared, planted and made the beautiful mosaic on the floor were women...). Not quite as high profile as The Land Is Ours squatting of the site of the old Wandsworth Guiness Brewery in 1996 , or indeed of Winston's Green mohican, but at least its lasted 12 years now...

Want to get started in guerrilla gardening? Start small- I once found a handful of left over onion sets in my pocket when waiting for a train- I pushed these into the soil of a flower bed by the bench, hey presto, a few months later, free onions!

Or for further inspiration check out my co-guest Richard's website at http://www.guerrillagardening.org