Yuri Posted May 18, 2010 Share Posted May 18, 2010 Some days ago I was doing a "guerrilla gardening" action... you know... when you put trees and flowers in a public area without any authorisation... Anyway, you know how it works... whenever you are doing some kind of work there's always someone (usually grumpy old men) coming to offer advice, tell you that you are doing it completely wrong and so on... This time it was a place we are trying to recover... an almost abandoned garden, there's almost no grass at all, because everyone keeps stepping on it making the soil hard as rock... Last november we had put there some trees and bushes just to keep it safe from the "traffic" and now it's time for grass and flowers... of course a lot of digging to loosen the rock-hard soil... After a couple of minutes a man comes by... clearly a drug addict (yeah, the place is usually pusher-populated, one of the reasons to try to recover it...) but this time he was a rather "uncommon" drug addict.... I must say I don't like drug addicts so much, probably a prejudice, but I have always considered drug addicts "weak people", that instead of fighting the problems of life, gave up and ran away on a far, different world... (but as I said, probably a prejudice, who am I to judge?) As I said, he was a rather uncommon drug addict, he was maybe in his mid-40s and started asking me who I was, why I was doing that work, made comments about the tools, telling I had choosen the rigth ones, then he asked if I could tell if the municipality was drafting other people to fix up gardens, where he could go asking to be drafted an so on. Gave him a few directions (but of course I didn't explain him we were doing an ILLEGAL GUERRILLA GARDENING), then he said something that left me speechless.... He said that working hard, digging such a rock hard soil, is definitely a hard work BUT you need to work hard to be a better man, because only the hard work tells you the real value of things.... What a lesson from a drug addict.... it's something I always thought about... and it's something that it's hard to understand in today's world, where it seems that everyone is looking for easy money, easy fame (and then girls, fast cars and so on....) We ended up talking about his father (a bricklayer), the plants we were putting there and my wish to grow a vineyard soon or later.... Strange afternoon, indeed.... Quote Link to post Share on other sites
HOLMES Posted May 18, 2010 Share Posted May 18, 2010 Hard work calms the SOUL... Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Bonehammer73 Posted May 18, 2010 Share Posted May 18, 2010 Cool! I know the Bomber Command did a lot of gardening in the North Sea, planting radish, asparagus and nectarines, then R.E.M. sung about the beauty of "gardening at night", but guerrilla gardening was a new one to me! Your junkies are made of a better stuff than the ones stationing underneath my balcony. And your efforts to bring back some green to the city are commendable! Out of curiosity, what trees/grass do you plant? And do they ever get stolen? What with flower pots disappearing from family graves, I have learned not to be surprised of anything anymore! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Yuri Posted May 19, 2010 Author Share Posted May 19, 2010 Cool! I know the Bomber Command did a lot of gardening in the North Sea, planting radish, asparagus and nectarines, then R.E.M. sung about the beauty of "gardening at night", but guerrilla gardening was a new one to me!Your junkies are made of a better stuff than the ones stationing underneath my balcony. And your efforts to bring back some green to the city are commendable! Out of curiosity, what trees/grass do you plant? And do they ever get stolen? What with flower pots disappearing from family graves, I have learned not to be surprised of anything anymore! Well.... it was with some "deep thinking" at the area that we selected the trees..... In november we put 5 small maples (they were maybe more or less 1m high) just to block the path, then all around the perimeter we put.... it'll be hard to translate them for our friends not knowing italian... but it's 70-80 small (hardly visible at the beginning) prugnoli and spincervini. They are both bushes.... bushes with a lot of spines.... Yeah... we decided to put spined bushes just to avoid having people dealing with them too much... some years ago in fact the garden was full of nice laurus plants... but pushers used it to hide their packets.... I doubt they'll do it with spined bushes... (they might try the first time, then think they'll give up). Now that the plants grew up a bit and put leaves, thus protecting most of the area from the traffic, we dig and put random mixes of flowers, and tomorrow we'll probably sow also some grass (here and there, we want the place to look as "natural" as possible). Luckily today it rained so much, soaking the already digged soil and softening also the rest.... shouldn't be so hard to dig and sow tomorrow... Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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