You can thank the LA Times for that pun in the title, as I simply took the headline from their article in Thursday's paper about the guerrilla gardening movement (?) reaching Los Angeles.
You can call it political or social action, but guerrilla gardening seems much simpler than that. It is a wonderful thing as people take back unused and unwanted land - mostly in urban spaces - and return it to life with plants and flowers, leaving the barren and wasted a little more beautiful than how they found it.
"Brimming with lime-hued succulents and a lush collection of agaves, one shooting spiky leaves 10 feet into the air, it's a head-turning garden smack in the middle of Long Beach's asphalt jungle. But the gardener who designed it doesn't want you to know his last name, since his handiwork isn't exactly legit. It's on a traffic island he commandeered." - Joe Robinson, Special to The Times
According to the ever reliable Wikipedia, guerrilla gardening goes back as far as 1973. I first read about guerrilla gardening in Treehugger where they linked to a Toronto group who used the wonderful motto, "graffiti with nature."
Specifically, read the Treehugger article for more on the philosophy, and the LA Times piece if you've ever wanted to know how to make a seed bomb. If you're interested in giving this a try yourself, there are many sites around the web that could help, including Homegrown Evolution and GuerrillaGardening.org.
I'm sure there are some detractors, but much like Critical Mass is for bike enthusiasts, this is a great form of peaceful eco-activism.
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