a garden is a lovesome thing

This not-so-recent 3QD post on guerrilla gardening was a cheering one, since I enjoy the subject both as a concept (the reclaiming-and-planting of dormant or marginal urban space) and as a reality: there's a guerrilla garden on my street, less than twenty yards from our front door. Tucked alongside an aging brick warehouse, and reaching to the edge of the canal, it's been overflowing all summer with yellow and red flowers; vines creeping up an iron stair, and an expanding population of bees and butterflies.

The rhetoric and practice of guerrilla gardeners may seem, at first glance, to have anti-urban overtones: a rejection of the metropolis in favor of some bucolic fantasy of the countryside past. But they strike me instead as signaling an embrace of the city, a way of seizing and multiplying the possibilities of the built environment. What better way to lavish love upon it, than by making the concrete jungle into a half-green one?

I've been photographing the garden on my street for about three months, documenting the changes from July to September. Here are a few of the images.