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Abstract

The benefits of gardening for mental and physical health are well known. Gardening is also recognized as a local-level or grassroots response to the negative effects of climate change and global warming. In urban areas, dense neighborhoods, limited green spaces, contaminated brownfield sites, and, at times, restrictive council regulations on the public use of parks and verges can act as barriers to gardening. In the 1970s, guerrilla gardening emerged as a clandestine, environmentally conscious, grassroots activity to reclaim and transform neglected or derelict urban spaces into healthy green spaces. Although not as subversive since its inception, guerrilla gardening in cities is as much a recreational activity as it is an ecological statement of urban activism, which effectively provides urban dwellers an entry point to engage with the outdoors for the planting of edible and nonedible plants in artificial places and spaces where natural life struggles to exist. Guerilla gardening has been impactful to city life through its contributions and controversies in improving urban ecosystems, educating neighbors on nutrition and food production where gardens crop up, and broadly to the health of humans (and other creatures) who live there.