REBELS WITH A CAUSE

Guerrilla gardeners are unafraid to break law to fight climate, affordability crises

- FAKIHA BAIG

Eric Boyd says he guerrilla gardens to beautify places around Toronto with like-minded people. "It is very gratifying to put something in the ground and then turn it into something beautiful as opposed to the infested space that it was previously," says the semi-retired investor.

Brenda Dyck went rogue for the first time about 40 years ago.

She remembers how she grabbed her gardening tools, marched into a grassy field beyond her rental home, dug a small hole in the ground and planted her first apple tree.

“It was like a dopamine hit for me,” says the 61-year-old from her home in British Columbia’s remote Cariboo Mountains.

“I’ve always been a hard-core gardener. I eat, sleep and breathe gardening.”

She says she now regularly treks to a community shed near her home to drop off hundreds of seeds she has cultivated over decades to encourage more people to do what she had done — guerrilla gardening.

“Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening on land that does not belong to you without permission,” Dyck says.

“It’s revolutionary. Especially in today’s climate, there’s so many people that don’t (own) land or can’t afford groceries. It’s better for the planet. It’s better for communities. It’s better for everybody.”

Laura Taylor, an urban planning professor at the University of Alberta, says the term was coined in the 1970s in Brooklyn, N.Y.