Welcome to Big Ten Big Ideas, the life online event series from the University of Oxford was part of the humanities cultural programme.
My name is Vicki McGinnis and I'm head of cultural programming and Partnerships.
Big tent, big ideas brings together researchers and students from across different disciplines.
We will explore some of humanity's important subjects and ask questions about areas such as environment, medical,
humanities, alien technology, history of disease, as well as celebrating storytelling, music, song and identity.
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So thank you all very much. And now I turn on to our excellent speakers tonight.
It is an honour to host and welcome two very accomplished and generous people from the inverse city of Oxford.
Jaycee Niala is a doctoral researcher with an interest in how people's imaginations of nature affects the environment with a focus on urban practise.
She has worked on food sovereignty projects in Kenya.
Jaycee has used the Basin Theatre as a tool for community engagement, for both adaptation and mitigation strategies for dealing with climate change.
Jaycee's current ecological project plant, an orchestra, brings together her love for music.
Andres. Elizabeth, you it is associate professor in the anthropology of lowland South America,
research with indigenous peoples in central Brazil where she has lived and worked with the Panaro people.
She is interested in the material and visual aspects of the Amerindian lived worlds, including body adornment, beadwork,
garden design and village layout, and is also interested in the anthropology of everyday practises such as child rearing and gardening.
More recently, she has been developing research in southwestern Ethiopia.
Together with Dr. Walter Tadesse, say, on local agriculture and food production.
Jaycee and Elizabeth, welcome to the Big Tent. For joining us.
Welcome. Thank you. So this evening for a live event,
we are actually going to begin with a reading and this will lead into an on in conversation between Jaycee and Elizabeth.
But for now, I will hand over to Jaycee with her reading on guerrilla gardening.
Thank you very much, Vicky and Cedric, you for being here, everybody.
I hope that wherever you are, you are safe and well.
So guerrilla gardening is a type of urban gardening that takes place in spaces that we tend to think of as public.
But it doesn't have the same legal status as, for example, community gardens or allotment plots.
Imagine for a moment that there's a crack in the pavement that's outside your home.
Following adverse weather conditions, the crack widens to reveal soil underneath.
Eventually, there's a pothole.
And even though there's potholes and irritation, it doesn't warrant enough attention for you to call the council to complain about it.
One of your neighbours, however, also notices this crack and decides to plant some flowers in it.
You don't notice the seeds going in. But you do notice the seedlings as they begin to sprout out of the ground.
Time passes, eventually the flowers bloom.
One day you're walking past the flowers with your young child and she reaches to pick one up and you stop her.
You find yourself saying, leave the flowers. They look beautiful. They're. Shortly after this.
Local elections are being held.
One of the people standing to be a counsellor says part of their campaign, they will endeavour to make the council more responsive.
The flowers now call attention to the pothole that they were growing in.
The candidates, once these potholes fixed their health and safety hazard.
But when it becomes clear that those flowers were actually planted there by somebody.
Another issue arises. Whoever planted the flowers did not have permission to do so.
Suddenly, all the people who live near the flowers are made aware of the fact that the pavement
and the road that they thought of as theirs does not actually belong to them.
This is not an unusual feeling. I'm sure you've felt a bit of a sense of annoyance when you're driving home and outside your house.
There's somebody parked in what you think of as your spot. But actually, it's not your spot.
It's a public road. It's available for anybody to use.
It's in moments like these that the question of what public actually means to us in our day to day
lives can come into conflict with what public means in terms of the structures that govern our lives.
Like the flowers bursting through the pavement.
These moments of rupture show what was previously hidden, but also allow us to question what we thought we knew.
Let's think about this flowers a little bit more for a moment.
The plants that are growing in the crack affect people in the neighbourhood that they are growing in.
For some people, they'll see them as beautiful.
Other people may find them an inconvenience and find that they affect their accessibility to the pavement.
And the example I just gave, the seeds that were planted, but this is not true for all of the plants that grow in cracks in pavements.
There were also just examples where plants have seated themselves and these plants can also have very big effects on human behaviour.
There's a firm in San Francisco called CMG Landscape Architecture, and they've won an award for their cracked gardens.
These are gardens that they say are inspired by the tenacious plants that pioneer the tiny cracks of the urban landscape.
To have one of those gardens installed will also set you back several thousand dollars.
Here in the U.K., The Guardian newspaper gardening column, also taking its cue from nature, gives advice on crack planting.
This is an interesting reversal. It's in these cases, it's the plant agency, it's power to make a place for itself in a human crafted landscape.
That is the trigger for human action.
This agency parallels the behaviour that human beings show when they are making a place for themselves in an urban context.
The street I was talking about, where the plants and the pavements lie in tension with each other is actually a human invention.
Up until the mid eighteen hundreds. Streets as we know them, did not exist.
It wasn't until then that streets were widened, regularised, cleaned and local improvement acts concerned themselves with paving lighting.
But also the policing of the streets, as we know now.
And especially with that very important demarcation of the line between what is private and what is public.
Now, no one told plants in cities. That the whole way in which we live and the landscape was going to change.
And just as the plants were ignorant of this, actually, so were we as human beings.
We're quite ignorant of the laws that govern these domains.
Under English law, unless privately owned, all land belongs to the crown and is granted free use by the public via a local authority.
This use, whether it's the pavement's we walk on, the roads we drive our cars on,
is so commonplace that it escapes our attention that we do not actually have any ownership over the public land on which we conduct our daily lives.
It's only when this used becomes contested, for example, when guerilla gardeners take into their own hands actions to change the shape of the city.
But we start to question the uses that land has been demarcated by the city authorities who are responsible for its management.
Especially if we think about the environmental times in which we're living now.
And climate change. It seems counterintuitive that the action of planting flowers,
which are usually seen as beautiful and good for the environment, could see a citizen fall foul of the law.
And I think generally we tend to agree with this because so far there have been no reported arrests of guerilla gardeners in the UK,
but still guerrilla gardeners remain in a precarious situation while they're doing it.
Richard Reynolds, who's a London based guerrilla gardener, described incidents involving the police.
And he said normally that just confused. But ultimately, they let me get on with it.
However, this time he says, we had no plants or seedlings to back up our story.
It led to the police uttering the immortal line. Put down your tools or we're taking you in.
And I didn't want to get arrested. So I went back to my flat, drank a bottle of wine.
Came back later and finished up. But the fact that Reynolds could relatively easily evade arrest demonstrates the North's
reluctance to apprehend what they know the public are likely to see as legitimate behaviour.
And guerrilla gardening practises are even more likely to be legitimised if
they're carried out on the types of land usually targeted by really gardeners.
This is land that shows signs of neglect or decay.
And these types of land become very visible in cities because cities within their
histories often have an underlying blueprint of the way things are supposed to be.
This blueprint, this authority, implicitly or explicitly states the ways in which this is should be arranged so that they can run smoothly.
But it also allows for human behaviour to be regulated.
Guerrilla gardening at the same time draws attention to the fact that this land has been abandoned and therefore is unregulated.
While bringing to the fore a kind of natural order that allows those who practise guerrilla gardening to align themselves with nature.
A nature, as we know and as we're seeing right now, regularly demonstrates how difficult it is to regulate.
This circularity echoes the gardening cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth.
So in these moments of tension, of course, it would be confusing for a policeman.
Because by arresting Reynolds, the policeman would be rightly enforcing a human made law.
But at the same time, he would feel the tension of violating what sometimes gets called a national.
Natural law allows for different species to inhabit the same planet.
And that, we know, is in effect beneficial to us all as human beings.
So I'd like to invite Elizabeth now to come and join me in conversation so we can reflect on some of the practises of
guerilla gardeners and what it means for all of us in urban contexts and our relationship with nature and culture.
Well, thank you, J.C., for sharing your thoughts and reflections on gardening in unexpected places.
And thank you, of course, to all our audience who's joined us today.
Now, one of the things that our current situation seems to highlight, the situation of being confined in our homes,
staying safe in our homes is for me, a heightened sense of noticing,
a heightened sense of noticing exactly the sorts of things that you've been describing,
the awareness that allows us to notice flowers in little spaces where perhaps they're not supposed to be on the pavement in the crack of the wall.
Thinking then, as a social anthropologist, what about these small things, about these noticing of things that many people might go unnoticed?
It's something that, of course, you'll do as part of your project.
Now. Maybe this then allows us to rethink a little bit what kind of a space we live in, what kind of a city it is that we want to live in.
And this that makes me think about city spaces and who and what these spaces are for.
Why should gardening need a garden?
What if we were to think the other way around and in many ways, your reflections are just about that all day, not any space is a garden, perhaps.
All it needs is things to grow in it.
And of course, many plants grow themselves if they're left to find their own potholes, their own cracks in walls and their own crevices.
Now, that thing gets me thinking about the kind of language that we've been using around ideas of
growing and particularly in relation to the guerrilla gardening that you've been discussing now.
Because in many ways, warfare and extermination do seem to feature quite a lot.
Not least when it comes to public spaces, guerrilla gardeners.
On the one hand, council workers exterminating weeds on the other.
You can, of course, famously buy seed bombs. Not all urban spaces are the same, of course.
Public parks are different. These are maintained just as private gardens are cared for and permitted plants on the should and sometimes protected.
So for me, guerilla gardeners then enable us to notice our spaces and to create gardens where perhaps we wouldn't have expected them to be,
allows us to think of a pothole, not as a pothole, but as a plant pot, a place for something to grow.
No. These plants that find their spaces, these plants that find that cracks, that find that portholes.
They do that in very quiet ways. And guerrilla gardeners do that gardening in rather unnoticed ways,
not by brand powerful gestures of planning and rezoning, but just rather one pothole, one crack at a time.
And one seedling at a time that are places that reconfigures the spaces that we live in and come to feel at home.
To me, that's a very powerful thing. Which then makes me wonder a little bit about the very idea of power that you've talked about in your reflection.
Now, how does power then fit into gardens? How does power fit into public and private spaces and into cities more generally?
Who or what has the power in guerrilla gardening? The potholes, the gardeners, the passers by the council, the plants themselves?
I was wondering if perhaps you might want to offer some thoughts on that.
Thank you. I really I love the idea of our city spaces being given different colours by the garden, by gardening and I think.
In many ways, I think capacitors.
Almost a nexus, so a whole web of power which travels around between different actors as a particular points in time.
One of the things that really struck me when I started my project is I set out to
research urban gardeners in Oxford and I was very much thinking about human beings.
So I imagined I was locate myself. And on an allotment site and tend my plots and talk to my fellow gardeners.
But I very quickly realised that actually plants were also gardeners and insects were also gardeners.
And speaking to one of the my fellow gardeners, human gardeners on a site,
he talked about how many plants do better in cities because they get warmer, initiated by buildings.
So the city itself is also a gardener and holds in its own way a particular kind of power.
So it feels to me like we have moments when the power becomes a bit more visible through particular actions.
But I would find it very hard to say that there was one more than another.
At any given time. Yeah.
And so then I suppose that then brings me on to thinking a little bit about this kind of question of tenacity and clinging on,
because we've we've talked very much in terms of, you know, finding a space to grow that we know, of course, that these plants find a crack.
And then, lo and behold, somebody pulls up the plant and you have you know, the plant has another plant, has to find its crack.
It has to start again to cling on. If you walk along walls and know brick walls and you see these cracks with little flowers just hanging on in there,
hanging on in that and just that tenaciousness and that the mom to find a space for themselves,
which makes me think a little bit more about the idea of home and belonging and how plants and people find find themselves at home,
find themselves a space to belong in in cities which comes with ease for some.
And it is incredibly difficult for others.
And I just wondered if you wanted to expand a little bit on on that question of of belonging.
What is it to belong? Who belongs where? And again, who gets to decide?
Who gets to decide? The plant decides. This is my home.
It's my my my my part, my space. The council decides this is the pothole that needs to be filled.
A passer by might decide this is the hole that tripped me up.
So those questions of who belongs where and how do we find a way of agreeing that that both plants and humans can can can live alongside each other?
I mean, I think it's I find it really fascinating that question of belonging,
because I feel like there's an interesting dance that goes on, particularly between plants and human beings around that belonging.
As much as. Let me think.
I'll think about specifically apples, because in Oxford, there is a very intimate relationship of belonging between human beings and apples.
So one way of looking at Oxford would be to look at a map of the city with its buildings and the colleges that are a very big feature.
But another way of looking at the city could also be the old orchard lines.
And it always strikes me in the autumn and around harvest time.
How many houses have baskets outside with the apples in them windfall?
There's too many for that particular family to eat. And I think the apple tree and Oxford in many ways show that dance of belonging apples
originated from Kazakhstan and travelled inside humans and animals all through Europe.
And yet they found themselves in the U.K. in a place where they are now very
much considered to belong to with human beings and so intimately connected.
They are the apple trees in the city of Oxford are doing better than in the surrounding
countryside because as humans make their place and try and make beautiful places in the city,
they plant and choose to plant lots of flowers, which increases the number of pollinators, which makes it easier for the apple trees to thrive.
So I see it in terms of who gets to decide for every apple tree that might get cut down to make way for a road.
Another apple tree may be pollinated by its neighbour in a garden and therefore make a place for itself.
So I see it as a dance of belonging somehow. Yeah, and it is interesting, isn't it, to think also about, well, what sorts of plants belong in spaces?
So if we think of public parks and in in your reflection talked about the idea in flowers are colourful and they're beautiful.
And, you know, it's it's nice to have them around.
But of course, public parks could also be amazing spaces for more than just flowers or indeed flowers,
which are blossom that exactly then turn into lovely, lovely apples at the end of the summer.
So that's something that I often wonder as I walk through the parks is why not more of the parks related by lettuces and courgettes?
Beautiful as the daffodils are and beautiful as you know the daisies are.
What is it about public parks which are full for for for our enjoyment, but apparently not necessarily to go and eat from them?
That's a good point. I do think it's interesting what uses we we see of space and the idea of productivity as well.
The allotments, the full title for the Allotment Society is that the national allotments of the National Society for Allotments and Leisure Gardens.
And the reason I mentioned that in relation to parks is it is actually a point of tension.
Some people feel that allotments should be just for growing food.
And if leisure gardens should therefore be like parks and and they see that as a split and that for other people,
if you're growing, whether it's food or whether it's for more static's, there shouldn't necessarily be that split.
But I do feel that it's it's it's interesting choices that get made, because if we're saying that something is beautiful, the flowers are beautiful.
Well, what about a row of, as you mentioned, vegetables, or is that not the type of beauty as well?
I suppose then the question of property inevitably starts to sneak in and I can hear in the back of my head voice saying,
but the person who put the work in is, you know, is rightfully entitled to the row of carrots, not the leisurely passer by who pulls one up.
So, as you know, I suppose we can't really think about these things without then also starting to think about regimes of property and,
you know, who owns what. And one of the very.
Citing things to me about guerrilla gardening, is that these sort of boy evade that question of property.
Flowers grow, things grow. But there's no there's not a clear sense of, well, whose is this?
And I think that's a powerful thing. And it's probably something that all of us need to think more about is that the processes of
growing things and producing things without tying them to I grow my vegetables on my plot.
These are mine and nobody else's, because lo and behold, as you describe at the end of the summer,
we've got too many apples and we put them out for a for our neighbours.
But, yeah, certainly that that question of property, I think rears its its head for.
For better or worse. But I think it's very it's so it is so strongly held the idea of property and particularly to come back to English law.
Your home is not your home because you own it. The rights that you have is the right to exclude people from your property.
I mean, what I like that's where my research I found that quite profound, that actually it's about who you keep out more than actually who is met him.
And I see this when I put in the course of my research,
I've spoken to several people who actively grow fruit in their front garden to invite people to take from it.
But people find it very hard to do that, even if there is no fence.
And even if there's a sign saying, I am growing this fruit for you, do help yourself.
They report that passers by find that, you know, there's something that actually stops people.
And you're right. What guerrilla gardening reminds us is, is of that idea that you can do it for others to enjoy.
And it's not about even this invisible line that people don't cross over.
And I it faces questions of boundaries and walls and fences.
Then on the question of the public and the private.
That you were talking about and again, one of the beauties of guerrilla gardening seems to me to be that, you know,
that these boundaries get transgressed and get broken down both by the act of sprinkling seeds where they were not expected,
but also by the plants themselves,
just find their way through these fences to find that little crack in the wall to grow in and just break down a little bit.
Some of the boundaries between what's mine and what's yours.
Well, I think plants are always really good at doing that.
Anybody who has a garden will invariably know that they have some parts of their neighbours plants within their own garden.
Because I love the way that they you know, they just ignore our fences.
That's right. And of course, for better and worse. Right. So this marvellously, you know, my neighbours, Jasmine, spilling over into my plot.
But, you know, what about the knotweed, for example, spilling through under the fence.
And of course, that, you know, for better or worse, I say, because, of course,
if nothing else, it certainly makes us strike up conversations with our neighbours,
hopefully to celebrate the jasmine, but perhaps also to complain, to complain about,
you know, the weeds that keep coming through the fence that's leaning over and so on.
But I think it's it's also interesting when a boundary is brought to an attention, what else it can do.
There was a wonderful situation on an allotment site where there was a plot that was divided into two and on
one half the person hadn't been tending it very well and there were all sorts of brambles growing very high.
And the person on the other half had been complaining and complaining. And eventually the person hadn't been tending.
That plot moved on. And the new allotment team arrived and cleared everything away.
And the person who had been complaining suddenly realised that their plants were worse
off because they hadn't been sheltered by all of these brambles that were growing.
And so this what subprime trees don't always do what we think that they do.
And sometimes by having that brought to our attention, we get to see other ways of being.
And so exactly there's that opportunity. Isn't that to just we we think or perhaps see afresh that the world that you're living in?
So the thing that looks like a fence or a wall turns out to actually be a shelter.
The porthole that looks like a trip has it turns out to be a plant pot.
And so there there's an opportunity there isn't there,
to look at the world through eyes that are shaped by another set of categories, if you like, another way of looking at the world.
And that, again, seems to me to be a rather powerful thing. Very much so.
And and something that can actually change the way that we do things.
You know,
I was I was talking to somebody today who shared with me daffodils that she planted as a guerrilla gardener that were avoided by a Virge Cutter.
And the fact that to think that actually a daffodil has the power essentially to make somebody decide that they will not cut them down,
what they recognised in that moment is really quite powerful.
Yeah, that's a that's an interesting example, isn't it? And I suppose it then makes you come back to this question.
Well, a daffodil which wasn't meant to be there by virtue of its presence, has established a space for itself, which,
you know, I think we see that with plants that cut across parks where you shouldn't have a path and people just walk.
It's maybe it's a shortcut. And you walk across the park on this path that's not meant to be a path.
And over a certain amount of time, lo and behold, it becomes a path and and it becomes a legitimate space in which to walk, if you like.
I think it gives me a lot of hope that we can actually shape our cities and we can be co creators with different species to do that.
I think cities I mean, I'm biased. I'm an urbanist. But cities, I think gets a lot of flack for being quite hostile or unyielding places.
But actually, I think what guerilla gardeners remind us is that we do have the possibility to procreate our cities.
We don't have to feel that the structures that we find ourselves in a fix to a point that we have no form of entry or conversation with them.
Yeah, that's right. Now, let me just play devil's advocate just for a moment on that,
because I absolutely agree with you that there is a sort of a message there of co creation and coexistence, which which is very beautiful.
I want that. Is there a risk of becoming almost too starry eyed about that?
And in co creating these spaces are we've been asking locking some people out of some species, some particular kinds of plants.
Do we have to be careful to keep that conversation very open so not to fall from, you know,
the power of the planners to some other kind of power, which also excludes excludes one or other constituency?
Well, I mean, it comes down to weeds, doesn't it? And the whole idea of a weed being a plant out of place and, you know,
the decisions that are made around what is a weed, what do redecide is beautiful and what is acceptable.
And I think, you know, you briefly mentioned Japanese knotweed.
And I find it really fascinating how in Victorian times it was given as a gift.
Ended up in Kew Gardens. One prises was seen as this amazing,
beautiful plant has now become a plant that can completely devastate a neighbourhood socially, economically, if it's found.
It's been declared an invasive species.
If it's found in your house, it can destroy the value of your home.
And this is the same plot that we're talking about that has now been categorised differently.
But then most recently, again, there's been a chemical within it that has has medicinal potential.
And so all of a sudden, the same plant is taken into a different category.
Well, so long as it's very strictly controlled and guarded in labs, it's now applied to the kids.
We seem to have a use and therefore shouldn't be completely eradicated.
And what I find interesting in this very same plants,
having very different life cycles is it shows us also how we can do that with human beings and
how we can have certain human beings that could be initially exercised in a particular country,
go through a period where they are seen as taking over and therefore not to be seen as being wanted.
But if they seem to have a special case gift or special skill, they can benefit their country.
They can then be regulated. So I think that plants can also teach us about how we treat each other.
Yes, that seems a pretty important point to to to make.
And, of course, the history of inclusions and exclusions, both of people and of plants, is one that we do well to pay attention to,
both for the sake of living together as human human social groups, but surely also for the sake of the maintenance of biodiversity.
So it's not just one kind of them plant that we that we'd like to have in our gardens.
And as you mentioned, because cities have now become places of heightened biodiversity, more biodiverse in many cases when then the countryside.
So that too makes me then think, well, you know,
cities clearly do a very important role to play as sites of biodiversity in the future, but also, I suppose aside.
So food production in the future, through allotments, through back gardens, perhaps through public parks out there.
I mean, wouldn't it be amazing to have, you know, public orchards in places where it was just, you know, people could just go and they can eat?
I mean, they existed. You know, you get a lot of work in low land South America.
Essentially, it would be great to have an example from your work of how that works.
Well, so that's right. So that did make me think a little bit about that and about the value of collective work as opposed to individual work,
and I think it's really important to emphasise that.
You know, in the case where I work in an in lowland South America with indigenous people who are very keen horticulturalists who grow,
grow their own food, and to do that in part through collective labour, through working together.
Nevertheless, the idea of who owns the food is very strongly entrenched.
So it's not really a matter of people being able to walk into each other's gardens and help themselves.
Quite, quite the opposite. It's quite the opposite. It has to be said so collectively.
Working together, on the other hand, is very, very highly valued. And that's something that perhaps we also could learn from and and think through.
And I know that happens in neighbourhoods that, you know, people help one another out and so on.
It's perhaps not quite on this of, you know,
formalised level and and widespread spread level that you see certainly in the context of a fun out of people,
indigenous people in central Brazil, working together collectively as part of what it is to be a good person to do, lead a good life.
Yeah. So suddenly, um, I'm sure things there that we could we could learn.
I mean, I think that are just as you said, there are examples in the U.K. certainly on different allotment sites.
One of the really lovely things I'm seeing happening at the moment is that there are people who are
looking after other people's plots if they can't get to the site because of the current restrictions.
And that has really emerged quite spontaneously as a way to ensure the continuity of that plot.
So I what I love about researching allotments is they tend to bring out the best of people during points in crisis.
They tend to really demonstrate that possibility of what can happen in points of crisis, of how people can support and work with each other.
Yeah. It is a very beautiful thing to see, isn't it? And then perhaps now more than ever.
I think we're seeing some of those those qualities of people reaching out to one another and and being there to support one another,
really coming to the fore. So perhaps it would be nice on that positive and hopeful to move to a question and answer session.
Yes, that would be great. That's where I come back in SEC.
Thank you so much, both of you, J.C., for your reading. And Elizabeth and J.C., both of you, for that really interesting conversation.
I know I certainly have learnt a lot from you know, I had an idea as to what urban gardening and guerrilla gardening was.
I now have a better idea. I also have some questions of my own.
And as I am here in person, I would love to ask those questions of you both.
We also have a number of questions that have come through on social media. So I will ask those as well.
And thank you to those who have sent those questions.
If you still have questions, feel free to put those to us on the YouTube chat and we will pick those up and hopefully make time for those, too.
So thank you very much. What we heard today was really interesting outline of how urban gardening and guerrilla gardening
as part of that can touch on so many areas that you've spoken about inclusion and exclusion.
You talked about identity. A really important question I think everyone seems to have.
And this thread is about ownership. That's really interesting to see if you put so much time into this.
Who's who who then can take the daffodils or all the will?
The lettuces, as you say, Elizabeth, in those public parks.
Something I'd like to say is that food versus Flora seems to be a quite interesting point that you both made.
Of course, what is. And again, it goes back to that point.
You have also made about value. So coming over to one of our first questions is related to that, the idea of ownership and public space.
One of the points that was made on social media was about people planting things on Vergis and the balance between accessibility,
of course, and maintenance.
You mentioned potholes quite often visions of my own street, by the way, which I suppose I'll have to drive round daffodils and so footholds.
But am I perhaps if we can if we can come to you, Elizabeth.
First of all, what are your thoughts, particularly on that balance of public and accessibility?
And of course, maintenance. Yeah. And of course, the question of accessibility is a huge one.
When you mention, though, having to drive round the daffodils, I am immediately thinking, well, traffic calming measures could work.
The sleeping policeman and I slowed down the traffic.
So I think I still think about accessibility and break that down into.
Well, you know this. Streets, pavements are for people to occupy.
There always are these debates, are there not, about, you know, is it the cause of the cyclists or the pedestrians and so on?
You know, I'm not. Or we've got enough time.
And one us another show, Elisabeth, on the question of accessibility.
Well, there is clearly, you know,
a difference between planting an entire pavement full of daffodils and then you can walk through because let's face it,
when the daffodils aren't there, it's wintertime in the U.K. It's going to be very, very muddy.
To to to make the space less liveable rather than more liveable.
On the other hand, if we thought about ways of farming the traffic with plantings of the daffodils, that might be that might be more viable.
Mm hmm. Interesting. Jason, what are your thoughts?
Well, it was it was interesting. I was thinking actually more when you're talking about food and flora,
because also I think a lot of what we're talking about today are categories and plants move between them.
So what we think of is the wonderful English. Dahlia started off as a food in South America with a Cuba that was eaten there.
But when it came here, it turned into Flora.
So I think, again, to kind of come back to what I think guerrilla gardening does so well is it shakes up all these categories.
It reminds us that what we think about as one particular category, actually, it can move, it can change shape and it might not be what we think it is.
I mean, on that also, I mean, we have to remember that these are not mutually exclusive things.
So the apple tree that, you know, blossoms beautifully turns into food later on.
Of course, we can have things that both flower and feed us all at the same time.
So this tree. And if if we could stay on the food aspect, you can tell Maya, Maya, a keen area here.
I think it's also it's interesting what you pointed out about the social aspects, because,
of course, we talk about urban gardening and both spoke about what makes the garden.
Not everyone has a garden. And I'm just conscious where in this particular period where we're told to stay at home.
And that question about outside space, we don't have it.
And that is quite often a social social thing.
And also thinking about the different foods that quite often make the humble crumble is what I was thinking.
You're apples, you rhubarb and your blackberries. My family quite often and friends, you know, we we find those in public spaces.
I don't think anyone does anyone consciously through Blackberries, I'm not sure.
But it's quite interesting how food is so interwoven into that social aspect.
You touched on the earlier I to Jaycee. If you have any more thoughts on the sociability of food.
I mean, I, I, you know, I have an obsession with the apple tree,
but what I love about trees is that they remind us that they had never met four individuals or even individual families.
You know, you can't. That's why the baskets are outside of the doors.
They remind us that actually, regardless of who planted or tended it, there are people who are going to benefit who did nothing towards that.
And I really I kind of like that because I think it also reminds us to look after each other.
One of my favourite apples is from a tree that is on the edge of a car park.
And I have no idea what she says, but it's just I mean, the apples are just divine love and I don't know who planted it.
I been there, you know, and it's just I. But I think in terms of to think about the people who don't have access to the outside.
Let's remember that we also do live with a lot more clouds and we forget about it.
We forget about all the clouds that are in our homes.
Very often we don't think about the fact that they also are breaking a particular boundary there, plants.
But they're inside our homes. And, you know, whenever you speak to keen gardeners,
they will tell you that the gardening season is also in their house because they will propagate, you know, germinate seeds in their home.
They will tend them. And only when it's actually safe for the plants to go outside will they move outside.
True, true. We have another interesting question come through on the chat.
Somebody has asked, what is the cultural history and origin of the term guerrilla gardening?
I know this is this is a question I need to ask as well. So, yeah. Which one of you would like to start on that one?
Like, with all of these things, it's very contentious.
So there's some who say it came out of a women's movement in the 70s and 80s that it was very much about.
This would have been most America. And it was it was purposely coopting the language of war.
Yeah. Look, about something which is otherwise seen as nurturing and being carryback carried out by agenda that is often associated with nurturing.
More recently, as I said, there's people like Reynolds, who I mentioned in London.
There's also the prominent guerilla gardeners in Canada who have said that it was them that came up with that term.
But for me, the one that I do lean towards is in the 70s and 80s, you know,
women who took over abandoned bits of urban land because I can really see how
they would have used that for the fact that it was such a strong juxtaposition.
Pinterest. OK, great. We have another question that's come through.
And I think this is this is very apt, particularly for you, your research areas, particularly you, Elizabeth, as well.
Amongst some communities in Ethiopia, Gamow, for example,
PASSERS-BY along Fildes are about to take a bunch of unharvested gridding peas or broad beans from Plotts if they needed to eat.
I think that's a really interesting concept to touch with what you were saying, actually, Jayce,
with the idea of boundaries and feeling allowed to go into particular spaces and your it seems to be campaign, Elizabeth, for public food blogs.
I wondered if you had any comments to add to that. Yeah.
And, you know, I think the reason it will get more it's okay to take a bunch of peas as you pass by is because people know that,
you know, that's as much as they're going to take. So this also speaks to this morality of sharing and that sense.
You know, we don't live in a world of scarcity unless we make it so right.
The world becomes scarce when we hold on to all the things we have and hold onto them for ourselves.
So questions of the distribution of food globally and so would be a great example in another
space and time to think about that question of the generosity that's built into that.
And that might sound like a very romantic idea, but it does seem to me that there is nothing to stop us from sharing with each other generously,
as long as people understand that what they take is a small bit what they need, as it were.
We've just had the whole debate about hoarding in supermarkets,
which would be a real example of where that is absolutely not manifest itself like that.
There are certain parts of the world where taking something because you know that you're not
going to take everything form for real weevils of social life is what holds people together.
It's what gives people confidence, part of a community. And that's something that I think we've got everything to learn from.
Yeah, that's that's great. Thank you. J.C., any thoughts?
No, I think it's you know, I think Elizabeth described it really well, and I think it it for me,
what it speaks to are the things that kind of hold the glue of a society together.
You know, in the same way that there are some things here around what what we know in the UK that we would not transgress.
There might be a different example of that.
And so I think these are where sometimes it is useful to learn from other societies, but also be aware that it's as Elizabeth said,
it is woven into their way of being, which can sometimes, if you're looking from the outside, make it quite difficult to understand.
Mm hmm. Definitely. I think, Lisa, nicely to another point that was made, which was about defining what we mean as urban, you know,
and in the context of neighbourhood first and somebodies message about, you know, some neighbours don't talk to each other very much or at all.
So, of course, then, you know what? What can this do?
Sounds like, you know, from what you're saying already, sometimes it very happily breaks boundaries.
I mean, the question of what is open is a bit like the definition of guerrilla gardening, it's hotly debated.
But you get it often tends to come down to the density of people in a particular place.
Right. And, you know, within the city context. So it then becomes various amounts of densities as to how urban a place is considered to be.
But I think in terms of talking to neighbours, when I did some ethnographic work in Summertown,
I'll never forget speaking to a resident who said that they had been living in a village in Oxfordshire
and felt more isolated and knew less neighbours and when they moved into a street in Summertown.
And because you leave your front doors at the same time and have certain rhythms that are more in time with each other.
She got to know a lot more people and found it much more friendly.
So I think sometimes the I you know, the preconceptions we may have of interactions in cities are not always played out in reality.
That's pretty interesting. Elizabeth, do you have any more thoughts to add to that?
So speaking about what the definition of urban I mean, I'm not going to get to how one might define the urban,
but certainly one thing that I think is worth thinking about is that the boundaries of the urban
and thinking about people who live in urban settings versus people who live in rural settings,
it's not necessarily the most helpful way of of thinking through how many people in the world live who might spend some time in urban settings,
but, you know, move back to the two to the rural areas and go between them or, you know, families, for example,
in southern Ethiopia, where I'm working with with will they tend this if we work in a rural setting.
But every farmer's household pretty much has one or two sons who've gone to the capital, to Addis Ababa to do work there.
And they will at some point come back. They've migrated to the city. They'll at some point migrate back.
Somebody else from the family will go. So there's a social sense in which has a perma ability between the rural and the urban embers movement between
them and some of the practises that people learn in in rural settings they may bring with them and in fact,
grow some some food in tiny little plots in where they're living in Addis Ababa.
Besso has so many of these these categories, they kind of defy their boundaries the moment you focussing and you think,
well, there's much more permeability there. And just like those, you know, urban dwellers who we imagine never speaking to their neighbours, well,
one day maybe you bump into each other in the lift and you do strike up the
conversation and you do realise that perhaps there's things to talk about or,
you know. So, you know, I think we so think about these categories very much in terms of permeability and flexibility.
Yeah. That's a really good point. We've had another comment through rather than a question.
I think it's a really important point. Going back to one of our earlier questions about accessibility,
and actually we should ensure that we include the needs of those with disabilities when they're navigating the streets and discussing accessibility.
I think that chimes with what you were saying and in your response there.
It is great to be able to do whatever we can. But of course, you know, there's always the issues we find as well.
You talk about pavements of for people. I often find a lot of cars parked up on.
So, you know, it is a real issue with you have a buggy or you have access needs a birth burse, different kinds.
So thank you for that point. And then we have, I think, time for one more question, if that's okay.
Given that many people feel a natural unwillingness to pick what they have implanted,
how Mike Precedent's or wheel of traditional contemporary gardening be, you know, given us a guide to create access for community projects.
I think what we're talking about there is your your points, jayce about people, you know, offering.
But still there's a there's a cultural barrier almost. There isn't the.
I mean, I think some of it is know possibly through the media, too.
To be quite honest, it's gardening has been hugely affected and impacted by things that people have seen on TV, on YouTube, increasingly and online.
So I think if people begin to see examples of it, if they see it demonstrated,
you know, for example, no dig gardening at the moment is increasingly popular.
And that has been largely through a lot of the media,
a lot of YouTube videos and big personalities showing their practise because especially to see no
dig gardening on traditional allotment sites where double digging was just par for the course,
shows that there can be big cultural shifts that can happen.
And even the most, quote unquote, traditional settings, if I may ask, and shows my ignorance of what is no dig gardening.
How does this work exactly what it says you've got and without digging?
Oh, yes.
So the idea is you have your piece of land that you you put mulch down and compost and you build up the soil without actually turning it over.
And so it is. And it's it is becoming increasingly popular, which is that is a big cultural shift because, you know,
when we think of gardening, everybody thinks, you know, you get your shovel out and that's the point.
But this starts from a completely different place. So I do think it's possible for that to be cultural shifts.
Mm hmm. Interesting. Any further thoughts on that?
Elizabeth? Well, just thinking about no gardening.
I mean, of course, it's not very good news for people for whom that kind of heavy duty labour is a bit of a therapy.
So, you know, there's nothing greater than spending your day at the desk,
at the computer and then going out in the garden and digging over a good old clock.
And feeling finally achieved something in the day.
You know, I think like all these things, that the space for all kinds of gardening, all kinds of gardens, all kinds of plants.
And just the very last thing I was thinking about in relation to your question
was how do we get these cultural shifts that make it okay to take a little bit?
Well, it's just it's a little bit like, you know, back in the day, museums were there for us to look at things, but never to touch anything.
And, of course, you know, over the space of perhaps a generation now, I'm thinking, well,
if I take my children to the museum now, it's very different with lots of interactive things.
There's lots of things where you're actively encouraged to touch it. So if we can do it for museums, I think we can do it for gardens to.
That's a great point for us to finish on that.
I think that the please touch and the please take signs are probably what we're advocating for, aren't we?
Well, that leads me to do now is to say thank you both so,
so much for being so generous with your time and your your thoughts and your words here today.
I've certainly learnt a lot. Judging from the questions, we've had a really interesting audience, too, so.
Thank you both very much. J.C. and Elizabeth also leads me on to do is say that this series will be live every week.
We will have one live event up until the end of June. Our next event is next week, on Thursday at five o'clock.
We would welcome you to come along and see us again then.
Thank you so much. This has been the Big Ideas series of the Big Ten as part of the humanities cultural programme.
Thank you all very much.