4. The stump
Hana Drštičková, Anastasia Blokhina
Guerrilla gardening makes it possible to trace the diverse goals and motivations behind the individual actions of gardeners. Cultivating plants or other making other gardening interventions that take place in a “no-man’s-land” (or maybe a “no-woman’s-land”) may be driven by a desire to aestheticize the surroundings, to use an “unused” space, to carry out environmental or political goals, etc. If nothing else, guerrilla gardening is a potentially adventurous and creative endeavor, especially because it is situated in a kind of gray area of legality. It stands outside institutional structures and thus requires discovering and creating untrodden paths, looking at the space around oneself "differently." Such an adventurous approach to guerrilla actions has been taken by a local group of friends who, during their irregular nocturnal gardening interventions, transformed several tree stumps in Brno's Lužánky Park into flower pots. In these pots, they grew selected plants with varying degrees of success. Like many of their (and not only their) guerrilla ventures, this one is marked by its fragile, temporary nature, which stems primarily from the absence of a wider (institutional or other) network of care that usually surrounds and sustains urban plant life. When such care is only provided by individuals, the likelihood increases that the plants (which are particularly vulnerable in urban environments) will fade or wilt. The spatiotemporal instability typical of human beings – going on vacation, moving from place to place, getting involved in different relationships and schedules – often leads to the abandonment of cultivated areas. Still, life in these areas carries on.
