Guerrilla gardeners with green thumbs

Channel Ten has dropped reality shows like Big Brother in an attempt to move into a new realm of reality television where activism gets the -˜reality’ treatment.
Enter Guerrilla Gardeners, a DIY gardening show which takes Backyard Blitz on to the streets, adding a healthy dose of cloak and dagger … just enough to get the adrenaline pumping.
The premise is simple: a crack team of landscape architects, horticulturalists and keen gardeners find an unused or derelict public space and transform it without any council permission or approval of any kind.
Included in this team is Mickie, who is not unfamiliar with transforming public spaces without approval. It’s something he has done as a professional artist for the last 15 years.
Basically they need someone like me to come up with cover disguises and harebrained ideas, plus someone who could bring in more arty and installation ideas so it wasn’t just about plants and gardening, Mickie said.
With Mickie on board the show becomes a touch more colourful. For example, one Guerrilla Gardeners installation saw the team complete a garden beneath a bridge, troll and all. In another, they installed a garden in a disused public area opposite Newtown Station.
But the pièce d’resistance? The roundabout they declared a micro-nation in Sutherland.
We called it the Republic of Gardenia and even made up passports and had rubber stamps from Immigration and erected a flagpole and raised our own flag, Mickie said.
And when the council came we told them they didn’t have any authority to step on our newly claimed nation.
It wasn’t until the 11th hour that the council shut down the entire project, by which time local residents had already gathered in support of Guerrilla Gardeners. The council decided to take a heavy-handed approach and dismantled the entire installation, all $2500 worth of free plants. They then issued the show with a $600 fine.
The term -˜guerrilla gardening’ has been around since the ’70s when Liz Christy and the Green Guerrillas reclaimed land in New York City for community gardening projects. More recently Richard Reynolds popularised the movement through his blog site, guerrillagardening.org, as well as his wildly successful book.
Despite the longevity of guerrilla gardening as an underground and then web-based activist movement, it’s only just made it to television.
It occurred to me that a really strong precursor to this show was The Chaser, Mickie said.  What The Chaser did at APEC as a political activism stunt was suddenly entertaining to the mainstream. It surpassed what most activists actually are able to do themselves by ridiculing excessive authority in government and making it absolutely palatable to the mainstream.
So anti-authoritarianism was suddenly something that had always been there in the Australian psyche but television had never tapped into.
Mickie’s advice to any potential guerrilla gardeners out there is simple: grab the spade by the balls.
Do it in the daytime, he said. Be totally ballsy and totally out there.

info: Guerrilla Gardeners screens on Channel Ten on Wednesday at 8pm.