Get Guerrilla Gardening A Handbook for Planting in Public Places by Ellen Miles

An accessible guide to public planting with purpose, encouraging people to make urban communities greener, healthier, and happier

Discover why it’s worth greening your community in this engaging, step-by-step framework on how to guerrilla garden.

Guerrilla gardening is the art and science of planting in a public place with a purpose. Whether you want to boost biodiversity, grow food, clean the air, or empower a community, you can join this new wave of a movement that combines grassroots direct action with flower power!

How do you know which plants are right for the plot or how to find like-minded locals? Follow Ellen Miles’s 6 Ps of guerrilla gardening to find out: purpose, place, plan, people, parts, plant. Sow wildflower seeds in a city tree bed, build a parklet in a parking space, or turn an abandoned lot into a community garden, tackling climate change and social inequality as you go.

This is a collaboration between a new wave of young guerrilla gardeners, ecologists, and horticulturists, such as Poppy Okotcha, Tayshan Hayden-Smith, and Hafsah Hafeji. Full of inspiring photographs of green transformations, illustrations of DIY projects, and a step-by-step framework to follow, this book makes collective action straightforward and fun.

Whether you want to create a planter from a tin can or turn an abandoned telephone booth into a community herb garden, this book gives you (most of) the tools to transform lifeless patches of public land into vibrant pockets of plant life.

Ellen Miles is founder and director of the Nature Is a Human Right campaign, which has now been made into a book with DK, Nature Is a Human Right. Ellen coordinates community action in her local area of Hackney, and she runs an award-winning social enterprise, Dream Green, which equips people to become guerrilla gardeners. Her guerrilla gardening work has been featured on BBC Earth, Refinery29, Shado, EcoResolution, EuroNews, and Insider; in Grazia magazine; and on the radio station RTÉ 2. As a young twenty-something woman, Ellen represents the next generation of guerrilla gardeners, and she is at the forefront of this new wave: her TikTok tutorial on seed bombing kick-started a trend that was reported by Vox.

Author Residence: UK

Author Hometown: Hackney, London