The last of autumn’s cuttings went into one of my favourite patches. I now have only correa alba cuttings left and I am not convinced they have established good enough roots to set them out into the wild yet.
This patch was my first, and it looks great. But, there is an invasive grass coming up there that is seeding. So I pulled as much as I could and tried to rogue the rest (yanking off the flowering heads to reduce the seeds that will be produced). One of the large saltbushes had died so I took that out too, and started to wonder how to remove my pile of green material! I planted rock roses here–cistus–and now I ave looked them up I find they are not actually native (well, they are native to the Mediterranean!) There were cistus growing here when I first moved into the area but they died long ago.
My friends close by couldn’t help me out with my pile of weeds this time. Along came a couple of women, one farewelling the other to a nearby train. I asked if the fareweller if she lived nearby and if so, whether she would mind if I filled her green waste bin. I must have been having a bold morning.
She told me where she lived–not that close! And then offered to come and pick it up in her car if I’d pull it into a pile. I checked whether she really wanted to do that and she said she appreciated what I was doing and we are both part of one community. I love meeting people who feel this way, while I’m out and about doing guerilla gardening. It helps my hopefulness a good deal. Twenty minutes later I had broken all the saltbush into small sticks and finished panting, and she arrived in her car and we filled up the back with weeds and dead bush.
Here is some of the bigger picture–everything apart from the tree planted by my friends and I. And of course, this isn’t really the end of the spring planting, because I’m putting seeds into pots as soon as I can free them up. A friend gifted me two containers of seed she saved over and above whet she could use to add to my own collection. So I made some tags from a yoghurt tub… and wrote on them with a pencil, and put some more seed in ready for autumn planting-out…
Local & Bespoke 
This post fills me with quiet optimism…thank you. You are the mother of gentle radicalism that is quietly transforming landscape and community…such powerful acts.
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Ah, Rebecca, what an exceptional compliment this is! I took up guerilla gardening wanting to do something immediate and tactile that would not involve me in negotiating things with others through adding more meetings into my life. At times I feel a bit crushed by the plants I lose and the acts of thoughtlessness I witness. But as the blanket of native foliage has started to spread and conversations have gone from “what are you doing?” to a more complex mix of appreciation and fellow feeling–there is so much more going on in this activity than I had imagined when I decided to try and stop Council poisoning the spot at the end of the street. ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ (Pamela Haines). Glad to have found you as a fellow traveller down that road.
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