Back to the garden: A new generation of Johnny Appleseeds

Enough man-made negativity circles the globe at any given time to make us wonder if our species is doomed to self-destruct and leave it all to the cockroaches, horseshoe crabs and the kudzu. From Robert Mugabe thwarting the democratic process in Zimbabwe and the Burmese military junta doing the same in Myanmar to the Chinese forcing their presence on the Tibetans, and beef industry and agribusiness leaders clear-cutting rain forests in South America for arable land, you don’t have to look far for signs of inevitable collapse.

But then you see something, below the radar, that some anonymous soul has done


What made me think of this was the arrival of an extraordinary book-length meditation and guide by Richard Reynolds called On Guerilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries (Bloomsbury).

Explaining their actions, he says “Some people have a different definition of gardening. I am one of them. I do not just tend neglected gardens but create them from neglected space.”

Smirking Chimp