The School of Life

Richard Reynolds on his stuggle to fill the world with flowers

I began guerrilla gardening four years ago. These strikes were solo nocturnal missions. My aim was to make myself a garden from the miserable and neglected flowerbeds abandoned by Southwark Council's horticultural contractors. In parallel, little did I know, but thousands of others were doing the same, taking land that was not theirs and cultivating it, for flowers and food, alone and in groups, in cities and in country lanes. 

A lot has happened since I began guerrilla gardening and it's all because I blogged about it. So here I am blogging some more to tell you about The School of Life's wonderful Guerrilla Gardening gift box (seen here), which contains all you need for a night out transforming some orphaned land into a little garden.

It also contains a copy of my recent book, ON GUERRILLA GARDENING, which BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time picked as one of their Top 5 gardening books for Christmas: "I'd go as far as to say it's one of the most unusual gardening books of 2008, well written, well researched, very inspiring". Unfortunately praise for guerrilla gardening is not universal and the fight continues on the doorstep... my local council (Southwark) have just pressed the big red nuclear button and declared war on my oldest guerrilla garden. The bombshell arrived in the form of an invoice to me and my 89 neighbours for gardening they have not been doing. Last year they refunded their fraudulent charge for three years of 'grounds maintenance' after admitting the work had been done by guerrilla gardeners. But now they have reinstated the charge without explanation. Read more about this farcical saga at www.guerrillagardening.org.

Richard takes participants on The School of Life’s PLAY course out for a beginners’ guerrilla gardening lesson. Book now for the course starting on 2 February.

He is also leading an Urban Gardening Holiday for The School of Life in collaboration with Emma Townshend in April 2009. Find out more or book a place HERE.

To order The Guerrilla Gardening Christmas Gift Box for £35 plus post and packaging, click HERE.

Sophie Howarth on Trees and Knowledge

As those who have visited The School of Life will know, we are rather partial to trees. And so it seems are the editors of Hamish Hamilton’s new online journal Five Dials which has just released its second issue, downloadable here. Five Dials isn’t strictly themed: ‘our themes, like rotting oak, break down, crumble and biodegrade halfway through each planned issue’ they admit. But the new issue features articles by the late Roger Deakin, Robert McFarlane and Jay Griffiths among others, so one could say it has more than a hint of the natural world about it.

'Everywhere in the world, people have associated tree and thought, idea and forest,’ Griffiths writes in her beautiful article Ancient Trees, Ancient Knowledge. ‘For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind, and your sense of kin - your social mind. The Malo people of northern Bangladesh used to have a custom of marrying a girl to a tree and a boy to the river, before their marriage to each other. For the Karen in the forests of northern Thailand, the umbilical cord of a baby would be tied to a tree; the spirit of the child dwelt there, and to harm the tree would be to harm the child; the ritual thus intricately linked person to tree.' Read the rest of the article here.

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.