I spent some of yesterday working on the garden of a friend leaving a fire pit on the lawn in readiness for a Guy Fawkes party last night. As we worked our way across the garden tidying – but not enough to delete autumn – I dug up a a couple of handfuls of Valeriana officinalis (native, loved by bees)seeded in the flags, two Euphorbia mellifera (loved by flying insects) setting up home away from their parent, a great pile of Geranium macrorrhizum (a great groundcover acting almost as a mulch) without its parent appearing to shrink in size at all and Lily of the valley (native) gone wild, to name a few.
My view is if the plants love it enough to spread so happily in a North London garden and survive without watering then they’ll do well in the guerrilla gardens of Kentish Town – that’s one of my definitions of rewilding the city. And, in order to do so as sustainably as possible, I also avoid expensive plants bought from nurseries raised often under heat miles from our conditions here which have no evidence of being suitable for this area and supplied in unrecyclable plastic.
I managed to plant and water them all in but finished doing so in the dark. That’s the thing about guerrilla gardens, the street lights give you more hours to work in.
Rewilding the city 