Confessions of a Guerrilla Gardener

Growing pot in parks, planting fruit trees, and starting gardens on unused land.

No doubt the alphabet soup of agencies already know, so I might as well make a public confession. I was and still am, a guerilla gardener. I’ve managed to reign it in the last few years, growing at home and on rented land, but gnawing desire compels me to plant pumpkins at bus stops and head out with a shovel and some saplings on clear nights with full moons.

I wasn’t always like this. I used to follow the rules. I grew some “sweet” peppers in the back yard as a kid that my mom bought as starts at the nursery down the road. I was never patient enough to leave them on to ripen up, even after Mrs. Cubbage, our neighbor, told me that if I leave them long enough, they’ll turn orange and then red. Most didn’t make it in the house before I ate them.

From sixth grade through high school, I picked up jobs helping my Aunt Maggie maintain the garden at McGurks’s, Uncle Jim’s Irish bar in Soulard, St. Louis. A district so old it bears the name of the French trappers who set up shop there in the 1700’s. Soulard is filled with tree lined streets and little flower displays and potted herbs for cooking on windowsills – nothing organized, just people who live there having fun. Aunt Maggie is the head gardener and she’d put me to work pulling weeds, trimming ivy, spreading mulch and that sort of thing. I didn’t learn much about growing, but I liked playing in the dirt and she always paid well with a small stack of Mr. Jacksons.

I spent many summer days around our neighborhood cutting grass, trimming bushes, and raking leaves in the fall. All this gardening took place in gardens, designated areas with hedges, walls, walkways, and borders. For that is what the word garden means – an enclosure, a guarded space from the wilderness beyond.

Marijuana proved a gateway drug to guerilla gardening. Yes, that’s right. I‘ve grown marijuana. I didn’t inhale though. Sophomore year at Mizzou, I found a few seeds and pushed them into soil from a creek-bed into a pot I found on the side of the road while biking to class. I kept them on my desk under a reading light. That’s about the best use that desk got in all its years in student housing. I lived with some friends at the end of a row of condominiums with a thick clump of honeysuckle next to our place that ran down to the creek. I brought a shovel from home, burrowed through the bushes, and dug the plant in early on a Saturday morning when I was sure there would be no witnesses.

Like the peppers as a kid, I didn’t wait long enough for it to dry to be any good smoked. So we made a tray of brownies instead, and we laughed and giggled all night. It was horrible. Tell the children.