Urban gardeners have long had one complaint: Not enough space. New sets of upstarts – who exist at varying spots on the social spectrum but share radical horticultural thinking and ingenious use of space – have city green thumbs thinking outside of the window box.
On one end stand the guerilla gardeners with their ramshackle tools, hip neckwear and dirty fingernails. The aim of these haute horticulturalists is to reclaim and beautify with flowering plants, public green space that has fallen into disrepair, or has become overrun with weeds. Infamous in the early seventies for tossing seed bombs (condoms filled with seeds and nutrient-rich soil) and flowering molotovs (a seed bomb in a fragile container filled with water and fertilizer), today’s guerilla gardeners garner support with blogs and challenge authority with educated jargon and after-hours gardening binges.
On the other end are the vertical gardeners. These agronauts have co-opted an old adage from urban real estate developers: “If you can’t build outward, build upward.” Instead of brick and steel structures, the artists sculpt living foliage onto building facades, creating blocks-worth of vertical green space. The movement’s darling is the French landscape architect, Patrick Blanc. His world-famous wall gardens are beautiful to the eye, boggling to the mind and are welcomed with opening galas and hefty commission payments.
Conceptual Billboard gardens (or ’sky gardens’) fall somewhere in the middle, straddling the line between these two modern gardening worlds. Not quite works of high-end, precision art, and not wholly acts of green rebellion, billboard gardeners would require permission before proceeding with their lofty ‘landscaping’ concepts (because billboards are private property it would be disastrous to both the gardeners and the gardens, to do otherwise). Most billboard gardens would likely be temporary, but provide a great alternative for cities craving new spaces to green… and have some corporation pick up the tab.
The videos below offer audio/visual insight into the first two fields:
VERTICAL GARDEN
GUERILLA GARDENING
Wed, Jul 9, 2008
Building & Architecture, Food & Agriculture, Green Living, Sustainable Cities