Why guerilla gardeners want to get caught

Why guerilla gardeners want to get caught

Margaretha Haughwout's fight usually begins after the sun goes down. The art history professor and her comrades carry bags of knives, wax and tree branches through San Francisco. Their eyes dart around, nerves on high alert.

"We try to have one person on lookout," Haughwout told me.

Haughwout helped found Guerilla Grafters, a group that grafts fruit branches onto city trees. Grafting is an ancient farming practice based on the weird fact that trees will accept new limbs. If you tape a cherry branch to an ornamental tree, the branch will start growing cherries. For Haughwout, grafting is a way to feed people for free. For the city of San Francisco, it's a crime. But that's okay; in fact, Haughwoute is counting on it.

It all started in 2011, when Haughwout and some friends came up with the idea and grabbed some branches. Things were more innocent then, and the group strolled down a San Francisco street in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied by yapping pet dogs.

"We were pretty conspicuous the first time," Haughwout said. "We wouldn’t be able to be like that now."

Not so surprisingly, passersby noticed them and asked what was going on.

"We said we’d taken a pruning class and we were just practicing," she said. "It made no sense because we were holding up the branches. But people seemed to buy it."

© The hands of someone better at grafting than me. (Barsan Attila/Shutterstock)

Source link