Who knew flowers would be controversial? (Me. I did. 💪🏽)
I live on such a cool street – it has a long artistic history, it gets used to film TV and movies and music videos and advertisements, and it’s still home to many amazing artists. It was almost demolished multiple times by the nefarious villains of our story, Hackney Council… who, to be fair, are just trying to do their jobs. Read on.
We know that last year, I did a great job getting some lovely flowers going in the cracks of my pavement/sidewalk in front of my house. They were so popular that EVERYONE wanted to have a go! There was talk at a local resident association meeting, I’m told, of smashing a few paving stones in order to make room for seeds! Whoa, I thought, this is cool (but also I bet we can plant without smashing first and see how that goes.)
Reader, we might smash. More on that later.
So every year, we have an arts festival on my street, and/or a residents party. In a good year, both!
This year, we sorta scaled back the art side (it’s a LOT to put on, and the same volunteers had been doing it over and over) but we still did a liiiitle more than a standard party. Including… drumroll… a guerrilla gardening workshop from yours truly!
Yes, here I am, teaching folks how to mix up my special bespoke slurry of clay and sand and potting compost and seeds, and smush it into the cracks of the pavement. I had clay donated from a couple local ceramic artists, seeds funded by a wonderful resident, and other supplies we cobbled together here and there from what I already had. I mixed, I bagged, we planted!
And a couple weeks later we planted all the rest I still had on hand. (I actually have EVEN MORE bags of un-seeded slurry just sitting and waiting in my garden, but we ran out of seeds! Oh, and I felt bad about the sun/shade disparity, so I actually went and bought more seeds that were shady side compliant and I bagged those up separately and planted them on the other side where the sun don’t shine.
Sadly, just a couple weeks after this, we had a major cold snap that zapped some seedlings. And THEN, the council came and wrought havoc. Because sadly, even though the council workers are only doing their jobs, and we knew they occasionally weeded, they tore up my beloved FULLY STILL BLOOMING petunias in an attempt to, ya know, clean up the street and take care of weeds! The neighbours were INCENSED. I actually took it better than most of them did, hah!
The thing is, flowers grow back. Many of my seedlings from the prior crop had re-seeded or started to bounce back. My little nemesia patch started bouncing back after The Chop, and one of my neighbours did a little fist pump in passing and was like, “fuck the man, you got your flowers back!” hahahahaha. Look, like, I get that folks are just doing their jobs! (But the council DOES make a lot of extremely questionable decisions about a lot of things, and you’d think that fully blooming flowers might be a thing that didn’t read as a noxious weed, idk.)
We then got some even worse cold snaps later this autumn and winter, to the point where I think this crop of seedlings is going to have a much tougher time than the round I perhaps got lucky with. But I’ve still got a bucket full of pre-bagged planting medium in my back garden, and I plan to use it, dammit! Stay tuned, gardeners. 🌱