Night Waves - 20/04/2009

In an event recorded in Liverpool at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking festival 2008, Bidisha introduces a lecture by Richard Reynolds and audience questions to him on the ethics and effectiveness of what be believes to be the fast-expanding craft of 'guerrilla gardening'. It involves taking over an abandoned section of land to cultivate crops or plants and is a form of non-violent direct action practised by environmentalists. Reynolds gardens wherever he finds himself, whether it is creating a garden in a number of neglected beds outside the block of flats where he lives or planting lavender on a traffic island. He believes any public space that has been undecorated by civic authorities and public alike can be turned into something more attractive and humanising for all. He claims he springs from a long line of radicals - he cites 17th-century Digger Gerrard Winstanley as a forebear - and he originally acted entirely without permission (although that has now changed in some cases), working on many sites that belonged to someone else - typically the public authorities.