Why I joined a secret society of guerilla gardeners
Our underground movement is fighting back against the march of the black roofs on the hems of our cities and our denuded, sun-slapped carparks and pitifully neglected nature strips. And there’s an art to avoiding being caught.
NIKKI GEMMELL
2 min read
November 9, 2024
Confession. I’m a rogue planter, and I’m not alone. We even have a name. Guerrilla Gardeners. But this is not so much about plucking weeds and propagating prettiness in tidy flower beds; our secret passion is trees. We’re unseen and unnoticed and we plant forward to walk into the past. To create a vision of what this land looked like, long ago, in tiny neglected pockets all over our urban areas. The aim: to sow beauty and wonder and much-needed shade, to reap birdsong and joy.
There’s a fair few of us out there. Stealthily planting trees, often native to an area, in an underground movement that’s fighting back against the march of the black roofs on the hems of our cities and our denuded, sun-slapped carparks and pitifully neglected nature strips.
Sydney horticulturist Tim Pickles has broken cover and spoken publicly of his stealth activities in southwest Sydney. He’s created a forest at his son’s school, targeted barren little slices of park, and greened up desolate carparks. He’s planted around 100 specimens so far in a crammed urban world of developer glee that too often forgets about the trees.
Mr Pickles’s secret? “Make it look like it’s always been there,” he confessed to ABC Radio. This means two stakes around a sapling, mimicking a council’s approach. “I don’t really promote that I plant the trees until they’re three metres high,” he explained. “By that time, they’re not going to say anything because they can see how beautiful they are.”
Some heat-baked housing estates in his region, with their muscular footprints almost to fence-lines, have a canopy coverage of less than 10 per cent. His zeal was fomented in the soul-sappingly bare carpark of the hospital his sons were born in. “It made me feel unwell.” One Sunday he planted 12 trees (with the hospital’s permission), which began his rogue campaign, over decades, to create beauty. The sons are now adults and after the hospital expanded only two of his trees remain, but they’re magnificent. “Six metres high, six metres wide,” Pickles explained. “They bring so much joy to me and I’m sure to other people.”
Trees are the silent sentinels that live among us, that give us so much. They lift us mentally with their beauty and collective smell, especially after rain. They cultivate happiness, draw people to them, shelter us and gift us an umbrella of coolness (they’re capable of reducing air temperatures by two degrees).
But then there’s the abomination of the tree-choppers. Those outrageously selfish people who wilfully destroy trees to improve their own views. It’s an enraging crime. Last year, in Sydney’s Castle Cove, 265 trees on a waterfront reserve were illegally destroyed. Mighty red gums and banksias were poisoned or felled, destroying the habitats of lyrebirds and sea eagles among 50 other species.
My plantings, in my secret place, give me so much joy; there’s a thrill whenever I see them. I’ve watched my babies grow from shy to soaring over many years. All natives, and common to the area, but in a place denuded and neglected. Not all saplings have survived and that’s fine, but slowly, some have come up strong; enduring, magnificently, until suddenly it has become a thicket of singing green. I do it for the birds, and for the community.
Trees are our elders, waiting for us. Giving us dancing shadows and birdsong, a balm of coolness and a thrum of happiness as civilisation accelerates, marching ever onwards, ever more greedily and thoughtlessly. And all around us, the despair of the trees as their like disappear. But the Guerrilla Gardeners are facing down the greed of the tree vanishers. Silently doing their work, to make hearts sing. It’s a secret community fightback. For all of us.
