Two quick articles on gardening
Jun. 8th, 2008 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on guerilla gardening, haven't read the whole article yet
Guerrilla Gardening
By JON MOOALLEM
Just after sunset on one of the first mild nights of spring, Richard Reynolds parked his hatchback near a traffic circle in the London neighborhood of Hoxton. Tied to his roof were a potted honeysuckle and a dozen box hedge plants, spilling out of garbage bags. Trays of bright white Paris daisies filled the trunk, and cartons of variegated ivy were wedged in the passenger seat. Hipsters drank indifferently outside a nearby pub.
The car was swiftly unstuffed. Soon Reynolds and five accomplices were over a short black fence and onto a small, squalid crescent of land at a bend in the sidewalk. They were ankle-deep in food wrappers and beer bottles and the spindly overgrowth of a bullying bush that Reynolds — bent over, wearing work gloves and high black rubber boots — started clipping fervidly.
“The problem is, it got too leggy,” he said. “This is the kind of plant that needs to be thinned every year, otherwise it becomes a scraggly mess.” The shrub along the rear fence was in fine shape, however, and Reynolds imagined it could be pruned and incorporated into their new garden. “That’s a buddleja. A buddleja davidii. Its common name is a butterfly bush,” he explained. (He takes a horticulture course one day a week in Regent’s Park.) “It has huge, very pendulous blooms.”
Reynolds is 30, long-limbed and willowy, with a floppy pile of dark curls. For the next several hours, as he and his troops reclaimed this lost crumb of London, people — young and old, lucid and drunk — would pause on the sidewalk to stare or cheer them on. Many asked if this was what they suspected it must be: the vaguely political, very radical thing they’ve heard is happening around the city. And this being artsy Hoxton — “the Williamsburg of London,” as one American ex-pat put it to me — what seemed like every third passerby photographed the spectacle for his blog.
But here at the outset, trash was being handed out of the thicket, then sorted into bags of recyclables by more foot soldiers. Full dumpsters were rolled across the street and swapped for empty ones. Someone found a wallet. Reynolds stood up holding a stainless-steel sink. A young woman in a green jacket with horses printed all over it stopped to ask what they were doing.
“We’re gardening,” Reynolds told her.
“Who are you gardening for?”
“For everyone and ourselves,” he said. “We’re guerrilla gardeners.”
Reynolds defines guerrilla gardening as “the cultivation of someone else’s land without permission.” He didn’t invent the term or the tactic but has become, as he puts it, “a self-appointed publicist for the movement” and the breadth of impulses and ideologies behind it.
Last week he published a book, “On Guerrilla Gardening.” It’s a political history of people growing things where they shouldn’t — from Honduran squatters to the artists and students he credits with originating the term “guerrilla gardening” in New York City in the early ’70s. During the city’s financial crisis, the self-styled Green Guerillas began cultivating derelict lots around the Lower East Side, either by clipping barbed wire fences or chucking “seed bombs” over them — Christmas ornaments or condoms filled with tomato seeds, water and fertilizer. After early confrontations, the city ultimately gave in and legitimized many of their plots into one of the country’s first community-garden programs, staking a claim for green space before gentrification vaulted the value of all that abandoned land.
Today, rifling through the multitude of guerrilla-gardening Flickr pages and blogs — discovering all the action in Amsterdam, Calgary, Turin, Tokyo or Long Beach — you can almost start to see this kind of vigilante greening as the instinctual human response to city living. In “On Guerrilla Gardening,” Reynolds describes gardeners he has met around the world through his own blog, guerrillagardening.org. (Its forum, where guerrillas plan “troop digs” and exchange advice, now has more than 4,000 registered users.) These include a sunflower specialist in Brussels; a founder of an unsanctioned community garden currently fighting eviction from vacant lots in Berlin; and the San Franciscans who converted disused properties into vegetable gardens, even pirating absentee owners’ water. Reynolds’s book is also full of references to horticultural “sleeper cells” and “shock and awe” plantings, and culls tactical advice from the writings of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong — though “I think Mao comes across far more kindly than I intended him to,” he told me regretfully.
Reynolds has helped build 28 gardens around London over the last four years. Unlike many guerrillas I spoke to, he is not building big community gardens, growing food or hijacking neglected, privately owned land to critique the capitalist system. Instead, he is planting strictly ornamental arrangements of flowers and shrubs on roundabouts, roadsides, tree pits and other slivers of public land that have fallen into disrepair. He is fundamentally an aesthete. And at first glance, there’s a confounding innocence to it all. Yet Reynolds has managed to stir controversy and, very recently, found himself surrounded by the police. He is quickly becoming both a subculture celebrity (Adidas sent him a treatment for a guerrilla-gardening-themed ad campaign) and a public intellectual, challenging ideas about what it means to live in a city — simply by decorating one.
Reynolds says that he has gardened with several hundred guerrillas in London and now hears of actions he had nothing to do with planning. A few weeks before the dig in Hoxton, a new acquaintance asked for his help reforming a muddy median near Camden’s Hawley Arms pub — a famed Amy Winehouse haunt that burned in a huge fire in February. “It’s been described here, very inappropriately, as the 9/11 of the indie world,” Reynolds told me. In the spirit of healing, guerrillas replanted the area with hedging donated by a woman in Notting Hill. (Reynolds gets frequent donations of plants and cash and says he spent about $1,400 of his own money on gardening last year.) They planned to prune the hedges into topiary the shape of Winehouse’s hairdo.
Reynolds calls such neglected plots “orphaned land.” Sometimes, as is the case with the plot in Hoxton, each relevant city agency assumes another one is responsible for the upkeep of a particular patch. Orphaned land is an abundant, underutilized resource in the postindustrial city, as is the creative energy of people like Reynolds who would love to garden but can’t afford land of their own. That is, even in cities where land is scarce and expensive, substantial amounts of it are left derelict. Thus, guerrilla gardening mobilizes gardeners without land to take over land without gardeners. A space that previously meant nothing to anyone is turned into “a catalyst for community conversation,” Reynolds says, generating a feeling of shared ownership of the city.
By now, most of his energy is devoted to looking after about a half-dozen established plots, keeping his work there from reverting into hives of overgrowth and litter. He and his girlfriend, Lyla Patel, often tidy up or weed at night, on their way home from pubs and parties. Patel, who is 27 and grew up in London, told me that the only times strangers have ever struck up conversations with her on the street are when she’s gardening.
Patel and I took the tube to Hoxton together since Reynolds’s car was packed with plants. She lovingly described him as easily impassioned and distracted — a classic dilettante, if he weren’t also an incorrigible overachiever about everything. Reynolds and his brother were briefly signed to a record label as an electronic-music duo, and along with a friend, he silkscreens and sells a line of T-shirts. One afternoon, he told me he was thinking about starting a one-man painting-and-decorating business to earn extra cash. The next day, he had a Web site up and his first job, redoing a bathroom.+
“There’s always something to keep him occupied, and stressed,” Patel explained. “He pressures himself. He’s a perfectionist. But people are always proud of their gardens when they’ve worked hard on them. It’s just, Richard’s gardens are all over the city.” She smiled. “And he is a show-off.”
Christopher Woodward, director of London’s Museum of Garden History, told me that Reynolds “is a provocateur. He’s asking questions.” The museum recently held a party for Reynolds’s book, and late last month, it staged a debate among Reynolds, an academic and a landscape architect about guerrilla gardening and changing attitudes toward public space. “There is a real thirst to bring nature and the seasons back into the concrete city,” Woodward said. “Richard is one of a number of provocative, creative people in gardens, in horticulture, in public parks, who are genuinely changing the approach.” As it happens, Woodward took part in his first guerrilla action the week before we spoke, scattering sunflower seeds and tending to a downed tree. “We lifted the tree back up, and we all felt wonderful,” he told me. “There’s definitely a real kick, isn’t there, to digging up public land?”
In Hoxton, after an hour of filth-clearing, a promising bed of black soil started to materialize. “We’ve broken the back of it,” Reynolds said. He turned up some dirt with a pitchfork to check its depth. “The California poppy will absolutely love it,” he announced. Then, raising his voice, he directed everyone: “But let’s not do any more digging. I was just curious. Patience!”
Reynolds grew up gardening with his family in Devon and at boarding school in Exeter, where, even at age 8, he took over the shoddy plots of his less-enthusiastic classmates. After Oxford, he settled in the South London neighborhood of Elephant and Castle. He found a flat in a drab, concrete high-rise called Perronet House — a building managed by the borough government. It was the first time he’d lived in a place without a garden or even window boxes. So he set his sights on the raised-brick flower beds out front, about 80 feet across. A few willful periwinkle plants poked out of the trash and construction scrap.
In the fall of 2004, unsure if anyone would mind, Reynolds began yanking weeds from the beds in the middle of the night. He planted a few clippings from his mother’s garden and started blogging his experiment. Gradually, he built the space into a lively garden: “a quite ambitious” take, he says, on the traditional herbaceous border style. (He has entered the Perronet House beds in the “front garden” category of a borough-sponsored competition intended for private homeowners.) Soon, he started venturing farther into the neighborhood to remake other orphaned parcels. “I was doing it for myself,” he says. “I was doing it because I wanted to garden, and I was ashamed of the grottiness of the area I lived in. It was plain and simple selfish middle-class pride.”
The following year, the British news media discovered Reynolds’s blog. A burst of flattering coverage began. He had just been laid off from an advertising firm and now had the time, and the celebrity, to coordinate volunteers to create grander gardens in larger spaces. Over four nights in 2006, a total of 80 guerrillas converted a roughly 400-foot-long triangular median of unruly grass south of Westminster Bridge into what Reynolds now calls “our flagship”: an expansive fit of euphorbia and helleborus, as well as small willow, cherry and dogwood trees, all vaulting from a blanket of lavender. Once a year, guerrillas harvest the lavender and sew it into little pillows, which are sold to support more gardening. When Reynolds took me by one afternoon, the deep-red tulips had just opened, and he took pictures fervently for his blog. He uses many red plants, he said, and tries to capture them for the blog with a red double-decker bus or red phone booth in the background. “Red is very much London’s color,” he explained.
Reynolds still freelances in advertising and is compulsively fascinated by the way things are marketed. He is keenly aware of how politicized, how anti-establishment, plants are becoming — even lawful ones. “They’re being venerated,” he says, as “a solution” to many of society’s problems. Plants offset carbon emissions. They can fuel our cars. Community gardens become places to sit with friends in cities where doing so has increasingly necessitated buying a cappuccino. Urban agriculture promotes food security or supplies fresh vegetables to poor neighborhoods lacking grocery stores. Recently, the architect Fritz Haeg has been campaigning to replace American front lawns with crops, calling his new book, “Edible Estates,” “a radical intervention” against our “repressive streets of zombie lawn-lined monotony.”
Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says “tasted dirty,” Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature’s order; he gladly plants invasive species if they’re aesthetically appropriate to the setting. Instead, he seems to focus on guerrilla gardening as a socially subversive phenomenon, breaking us out of the unconstructive role we’ve cast ourselves in as citizens.
“There’s this feeling that someone’s going to be doing it for us,” he told me. We respect public space by not degrading it: not littering, not vandalizing. But we rarely consider what we might contribute to it. Consequently, the common areas of our cities wind up belonging to none of us rather than to all of us equally. As Andy Brown, a guerrilla gardener in Toronto, puts it: “If it makes sense to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls of your living room, it makes sense to put a fresh coat of flowers on your neighborhood, because they’re both places you live in.”
Reynolds accepts that cities can realistically spend only so much on horticulture. “We’re their solution to a lack of funding,” he told me. More important, he argues, guerrillas simply do some jobs better than government. Guerrillas are fleeter. They’re not bound up in safety regulations, forced to drag around “Men at Work” signs or to suffer through volunteer trainings or write grant proposals like legitimate volunteers. Several guerrillas told me they’re particularly proud to be bringing more imaginative plant combinations to roadsides than the city does, more artistry.
“I grew up singing in a cathedral where every little surface of all the medieval walls was carved in,” Reynolds said. “It looked like a place that was really special to people — lived in and loved.” His gardening is meant to communicate the same affectionate and collaborative investment in London. “I’m not against the state,” he told me. “I’m not an anarchist. I accept society more or less as it is. But there are chinks, there are flaws, there are anomalies in it. There are things that get overlooked, and I think guerrilla gardening can be a solution to that.
“It’s sort of the geek in me that says, Oh, no, hang on a minute,” he later added. “Let’s look at this again. Let’s reassess this. This could be so much better with a bit of imagination.”
Since he went public, Reynolds’s run-ins with municipal authorities have been infrequent but strange. Last summer, after the London Borough of Southwark suddenly decided to resume its own upkeep of the Perronet House beds, encroaching on Reynolds’s turf, Reynolds arranged to meet the borough’s horticulturists to discuss the issue. “They were all wearing dark sunglasses,” he says, and refused his invitation to come up to his flat and talk over tea. At one point, he says, they threatened to tear up his entire garden and generally behaved like “small-minded, stupid, paranoid, negative, aggressive idiots.”
Eventually, Reynolds rallied the building’s residents behind him and was given verbal permission to continue gardening outside Perronet House — and there only. The encounter persuaded him that hiding his identity, as many guerrillas do, would be a mistake, feeding the assumption that he was doing something destructive. Being upfront about his intentions seems to defuse conflict with authorities, he says, if only because it so thoroughly confuses them.
The week after I left London, however, a troupe of guerrillas were suddenly confronted by more than a half-dozen police officers while refurbishing a traffic circle outside Reynolds’s building. Reynolds was as forthcoming as ever (“I’ve put that flower bed in beneath those railings,” he tells the police in a video of the incident, laying it all on the table, “and we’ve got some nice forget-me-nots going there”) but was nevertheless threatened with arrest for “criminal damage.” The guerrillas retreated to his flat, where they spent an hour and a half with a bottle of red wine. Then, when the coast seemed clear, they began scampering out, two at a time, carrying purple primrose to finish the job.
Councillor David Noakes, who represents Reynolds’s ward in the London Borough of Southwark, told me: “Generally I’m supportive of what Richard’s doing. He’s providing an example of the kind of member of a community that we want.” And yet, Noakes stressed, guerrillas put the council in a complicated position. Though the borough wants to “accommodate” guerrilla gardening, it must also protect the health and safety of the public and limit its own liability to lawsuits. “I can understand that, to Richard, the council must sometimes appear unnecessarily bureaucratic and very conflicting in its views,” he said. “It’s a very unusual issue for the council. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of Richard Reynoldses.”
Still, Reynolds’s most frequent irritants and obstacles are more mundane. His plants are sometimes stolen. In winter, they are singed by salt used to de-ice roads. At St. George’s Circus, in a traffic island he has cultivated for three years, Reynolds has been engaged in a long duel with jaywalkers who regularly cut through his garden. Initially, he blocked them with a laurel hedge. They barged through it. So earlier this year, guerrillas installed “The Pebbly Concession to Suicidal Tramplers,” a narrow path through the garden to channel and contain the intruders. Yet when Reynolds took me by St. George’s Circus the day before the Hoxton dig, the place was a disaster.
The city was digging up water mains and had fenced off much of the island, blocking the Pebbly Concession. “The path is completely pointless now,” Reynolds whined. Jaywalkers had started to wear away a new trail, through some lavender and dangerously close to his azaleas. As we stood there, two kids in buzz cuts and hoodies came stamping through behind us.
“You cannot do that, please!” Reynolds suddenly yelped. “Get off my flower bed! You’ve just destroyed all the plants!” He was screaming now. “Walk on the pavement!” he said, adding an expletive.
The kids didn’t care. One swore back at him as he passed, and an elderly man with a walker approached from the same direction. “Oh, now he’s coming along with his walker,” Reynolds moaned. “What’s he going to do?”
Traffic swept around the circle. Reynolds paced and complained — the perfectionist beset by imperfections, the guerrilla gardener versus the guerrilla pedestrians, each refusing to stay within the lines. Soon he found one of the road crew’s striped barriers lying in his heather. He fixed the plank across the trail, leaning it against a cabbage palm: a blockade. He was back to being cheerful, impressed by his cleverness. He stepped back to look at it. Then he photographed it for his blog.
What other malfunctions of the modern city could autonomous activists fix? How far can guerrilla urbanism go?
In his book, Reynolds describes a group of London anarchists who engaged in “guerrilla benching,” installing their own wooden benches on sidewalks when a local government began removing benches from public space. In France, guerrilla repairmen built a clandestine workshop under the dome of the Panthéon and, over the next year, refurbished its clock. Recently, guerrilla knitters in New York and elsewhere have been wrapping traffic light poles in colorful, leg-warmer-like cozies.
Still, Reynolds acknowledges that with gardening — particularly the kind of persnickety ornamental gardens he’s so passionate about — he happens to have stumbled into a realm of guerrilla restoration that is almost perfectly unthreatening to everyone. People generally agree that, unlike squatters or graffiti, tulips and rosemary are beneficial appropriations of public space; they are pretty, particularly if they spring from a beer-sodden trench of weeds. In fact, a spokeswoman for the London Borough of Hackney, the borough in which the Hoxton roundabout is located, couldn’t readily tell me whether what Reynolds and his troops did there is technically illegal. “Gosh, I don’t know,” she said. “Environmental vandalism would be illegal, but it’s hard to argue that gardening is vandalism.”
Even the owner of the neighboring pub who stormed out to have a word with Reynolds that night tried to stress, again and again, that he had absolutely no problem with guerrilla gardening; he’s all for flowers. But the borough had been reprimanding him about the noisy crowds outside his bar, and he resented the gardeners for adding to the volume and endangering his business. Reynolds superciliously explained that they were actually helping his business — “We’re gentrifying the area, making it a more desirable place to hang out!” as he put it to me — infuriating the barman even more. But before long, everyone was back to work, unsheathing the boxwood from its garbage bags. A car slowed through the intersection, and from the crowded back seat a man hollered: “ARE YOU GUERRILLAS?” — enunciating each word as if he were shouting to natives from the bow of his galleon. When Patel and Reynolds called out “Yes” in unison, thumbs shot up around the car.
Soon packets of poppy seeds — remainders of a Gardens Illustrated promotion donated by the magazine — were being torn open and poured into a big red bucket. A young woman in a raincoat stopped to thank Reynolds for “the difference you’ve made in London and in the landscape” and to ask him if there was any chance he’d visit her neighborhood. “It’s really bad, really bad up there,” she said, like a weary citizen in a Marvel comic book. “My aim,” he told her, “is to encourage people to take the same approach that we have, and just get out and do it.”
By 10:30, two and a half hours after the guerrillas descended on that scrappy shred of land, there was indisputably a garden there. A double row of ivy ran behind the fence and, behind it, flanked by clumps of daisies, boxwood enclosed the butterfly bush. Reynolds raked up. Then, when no one was looking, he unceremoniously shook out the bucket of poppy seeds around the edges. “Done,” he told Patel. “It’s done.”
And one on the use of excessive force against wildlife - go check out the comments after the article.
Peter Rabbit Must Die
By JOYCE WADLER
THE homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life.
Given the size of the property — a 12-acre former horse farm — fencing was out of the question. He bought a Havahart live animal trap but did not catch a thing. And he worried that releasing woodchucks down the road would only be dumping the problem on a neighbor. So he moved on to that tried-and-true landlord’s tactic: harassment. He attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his old pickup truck and stuffed it into a burrow — not to kill the woodchucks, just to encourage them to move on. That didn’t work, either.
Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.
“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”
He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”
“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”
Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny. How many did he kill that summer?
“I stopped at 19,” he says. “One was a suicide. It realized its days were numbered and ran in front of a car.”
The artist’s story is not as unusual as some would like to believe. As summer closes in, gardeners around the country are starting to worry about the animals that may end up enjoying their roses and cucumbers more than they do. Any day now, they know, they may come upon a carrot patch ravaged by groundhogs, lettuce ransacked by rabbits and squirrels, or a massacre in the koi pond.
But for many gardeners — the tenderhearted ones, who pride themselves on their decency and compassion — killing pests, particularly those with big eyes, fluffy tails and cousins who work for Disney, could never be a solution of first resort.
“People who garden have an obvious love of life, a reverence for life, and to kill something in order to garden is very rough,” says Liz Krieg, who runs the Rising Sun Greenhouses and Landscape Company in Bethel, Vt., and who dispatches only the scarlet lily beetle.
City people tend to take up gardening in their yards or at their summer houses with a generous attitude toward summer’s bounty, ready to live and let live. The woodchucks want a few zucchini? No problem, there are enough to go around. The rabbits are decimating the lettuce? Get a humane trap and move them elsewhere.
Soon enough, though, they realize it’s not that simple. The animals do not take one or two tomatoes as if they’re in a greenmarket in the Hamptons; they go down the row sampling, so that everything is ruined. Or they uproot and destroy a crop, without eating a thing, in their search for insects and grubs. There is, in fact, a sameness to the stories the gardeners tell: “If they just had taken one head of lettuce, or a few strawberries — but they decimated the whole thing!” After a season of grueling labor and multiple attempts at benign deterrence, the sight of a trashed garden is often the last straw: the moment when a gentle gardener will suddenly go Rambo.
Such was the case with Susanne Williams, a retired supply officer for the Alaska Department of Transportation, who lives with her husband in Douglas, near Juneau. Gardening is a struggle in southeast Alaska, she says; there is not a lot of sun. But she and her husband have two gardens, one at their home overlooking the Gastineau Channel, the other at the local community garden near the Mendenhall Glacier. They give much of their produce to charity and put up mesh at home in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out porcupines.
Five years ago there were serious animal problems at the community garden — black bear, deer, beaver — but “the worst pest of all was the porcupine,” Ms. Williams says. “The kindhearted would trap them and drive them 10 or 15 miles away, until one of the forest people said they just came back.”
It reached a point, Ms. Williams says, when gardeners were so frustrated that at least 30 of the 150 plots were empty.
“So finally, four years ago, we put an electric fence all around this big field, but the porcupines then decide to burrow under the fence,” she says. “They’re ingenious. So we had to put rocks down and pour cement.”
Even then, a porcupine managed to get in. And when she saw it, “strolling along, munching away,” she could stand no more.
“He was after my carrot crop,” she explains. “I said, I just cannot handle this anymore. He sees me and tries to wander off, but they can’t run very fast. I got him with the sledgehammer. He tried to dodge me, but I got him on the head.”
And no, she hasn’t lost any sleep over it.
“It was sad, but I am tired of being the fancy kitchen for critters,” she says. She has a friend in the area who has “just given up” on being kind to the animals: “He goes after them with a pitchfork and puts them in his compost pile. I don’t think the PETA people would like him much.”
She adds: “Doesn’t the spinach scream when it boils? I think probably all living things have some scream going on. We’re all predators, no matter whether we’re animals, mineral, birds or fish, and that’s part of it.”
Taking pest control into your own hands, of course, is no simple matter. There are the ethical and emotional issues, and while it is often legal to kill a pest, there are innumerable federal, state and municipal laws and regulations that may make it illegal.
There would seem, at first, to be many alternatives to killing. Besides mesh and electric fences, there are nets to cast over trees and gardens; foul scents with names like Not Tonight, Deer; and home remedies like sprinkling cayenne pepper around the tomatoes and dumping used cat litter into woodchuck holes. There are scarecrows in the north and fake alligators in the south, and household pets to scare predators away or to do the gardeners’ dirty work. There are capture-and-release traps.
But none of these methods work all the time, and some, depending on the species you are trying to catch and the area in which you live, may not even be legal. The New York State Environmental Protection Law, for example, forbids anyone but a state Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator from transporting a wild animal, which puts the kibosh on the use of capture-and-release traps.
Trapping and moving animals may not be in their best interests, either: a backyard suburban squirrel, transported to a forest, is easy prey for hawks and foxes, said John Hadidian, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States and the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife.” (The book suggests tolerance as its first choice for everything from bats to rats.)
And releasing an animal in a more familiar setting may not be in your neighbors’ best interests.
“We have yet to find anyone in outlying areas who says, ‘We love raccoons, please bring your humanely trapped critters here and let them go,’ ” says Wendell Martin, a retired engineer who has a five-acre garden in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise. Raccoons have uprooted and upended his water lilies to find snails. Mr. Martin finally borrowed a .22 and shot them. It was not an ethical problem for him, he says — the animals are overpopulated in his area — but it was not easy emotionally. (This year there seem to be fewer of them, and he has been trying to protect his plants with wire mesh.)
Then there are the difficulties that can arise when transporting a wild animal.
Jessica DuLong, a Brooklyn writer and marine engineer, managed to grow a fruit-bearing cherry tree on her roof, but even in the wake of what she calls the Great Cherry Massacre of 2007 she was not interested in punishing the squirrels who preyed on it. She trapped one in a live animal trap and set out to Prospect Park with good intentions.
Unfortunately, the squirrel had no way of knowing this. It threw itself against the walls of the cage with such ferocity it cut itself; it defecated; it ran back and forth inside the long cage in a frenzy so that the cage flipped up and down like a manic miniature seesaw. New Yorkers, seeing a fluffy tail in distress, yelled at the human involved.
“This entire class of preschool kids was out in one of their little preschool wagons, and the squirrel is looking rabid and bleeding at the mouth,” she says. “It was not what I had in mind when I started this humanitarian project.”
Not all city people, of course are so sweetly disposed to cute rodents. Joanna Lennig is an executive headhunter who lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. As a 10-year-old she was stunned to see her mother, “an incredibly polite, retiring, WASP lady,” attacking a woodchuck in the vegetable garden with a shovel.
“You know that body posture someone has when they’re using a pickax,” Ms. Lennig says. “She was just enraged. We just talked about this recently — being WASPs, we’d never talked about it. We were a family who canned the corn and canned the beans and really put food aside for the winter, so having an animal go through the green beans, she was furious. She said she’d had it.”
Ms. Lennig herself has no sentimental attachment to squirrels. About three years ago she saw signs of digging in the rooftop garden of her brownstone, which has pots of blueberry bushes, grape vines, tomatoes and peppers, as well as flowering plants, and is a regular stop on garden tours. She was unconcerned by this evidence of squirrel interlopers until the day she went up to find the garden destroyed, the blueberry bush razed, the tomato plants eaten through.
“There was a wow factor,” Ms. Lennig says. “Like when one looks out at the aftermath of a really, really, really destructive thunderstorm and says, ‘Look at that tree branch on the Volvo.’ ” Ms. Lennig went “straight to rage.” She and her husband bought a Havahart trap and captured a squirrel, then realized they did not have a plan. Transporting it to a nearby park didn’t seem an effective solution. Squirrels, they had heard, were territorial; it would only come back.
They did, however, as conscientious environmentalists, have a large rain barrel on the roof, which they used to water the garden. Who first came up with the idea of drowning, Ms. Lennig cannot recall, but it was her husband who handled the first executions. The trap, which was long and narrow, fit perfectly in the barrel.
Ms. Lennig has yet to be able to deal with the removal of the corpse, which is then thrown into the garbage. But she and her husband are now so comfortable with this form of pest control that when they visited Ms. Lennig’s in-laws at their lakefront property last year, where squirrels were climbing on the deck and ravaging the planters, they offered to drown them.
“My husband and I said, ‘We’ll take them to the lake,’ ” she says, “but our in-laws were having none of that. We had to get in the car and drive them five miles away. I spent the entire weekend like a soccer mom, driving squirrels around.”
Isn’t drowning cruel?
No, Ms. Lennig says. She recalls reading that you lose consciousness and then your heart stops; it’s actually one of the nicer ways to go.
A reporter remembers reading just the opposite (and the Humane Society agrees that drowning is inhumane).
“Listen,” Ms. Lennig says. “I’m a former attorney. What do I know?”
Few who have made the leap from pacifism to search-and-destroy missions are this open on the subject. Who, after all, wants to risk being labeled a hardened animal killer? There are, however, those willing to take the heat. Boldest are those who admit to killing garden pests simply because they are annoying.
Dan Rattiner is the founder of Dan’s Papers and the author of “In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities.” He has a house in East Hampton, and for the last three years he has hired exterminators to get rid of the carpenter bees, which, he is well aware, do not sting.
So what do they do?
“They sort of follow you around,” Mr. Rattiner says. “They’re curious, like Curious George bees.”
That sounds sort of sweet.
No, Mr. Rattiner says.
“You can’t sit outside — the carpenter bees come over to see what you’re eating,” he says. “They don’t land on you, it’s not like menacing, it’s like having small children that aren’t yours. You just want them gone. There’s no other way to do it, and I feel very badly about it. I don’t know why they keep coming back. You’d think they’d talk to each other about what happened last year.”
Many gardeners are able to kill only one species.
“If I see a spider, I would never kill it,” says Jessica Melville, a nurse in Woodstock, Vt. “We have woodchucks in the yard; they don’t bother me at all.”
But Ms. Melville, who lives with her husband, Hunter, and two sons, is terrified of snakes. Unfortunately, her home, an 1850 farmhouse, is built into a stone wall that the local milk snakes and garter snakes love. Ms. Melville’s husband, who co-founded cyberrentals.com, explained to her that those snakes are harmful only to the insects they catch, but no matter. Before kneeling down in the perennial bed, Ms. Melville used to do what her family called her snake dance, jumping up and down, because when those snakes heard the pounding, they slithered away. If she happened to see a snake, she’d retreat into the house, and that would be it for that day’s gardening.
The Melvilles tried a granulated repellent called Snake Away. It didn’t work, so Mr. Melville, who occasionally hunts birds, bought his wife a 20-gauge shotgun. Although some might think a snake would be a difficult target, it is not. Often, when a predator is near, a snake will freeze.
“I just went up really close,” Ms. Melville says. “I was probably five feet from it. The first shot I missed. The second time I got it and then it was: ‘Oh, this is great! One less snake I have to deal with.’ ”
Ms. Melville has been shooting snakes for the last three years and estimates that she has killed about 15. But she’s killing snakes that are eating bugs? Doesn’t that distress her?
“No,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just a happier gardener.”
Second thoughts? Regrets? Nightmares?
“Nope, never,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just glad they’re gone.”
Regrets are even rarer among those whose livelihoods are threatened by pests.
Oskian Yaziciyan lives in Homestead, Fla., about a 20-minute drive north of Key Largo, where he runs Goldfish & Koi U.S.A., a two-and-a-half-acre ornamental fish and water lily farm. He has great feelings of affection for some of the animals other people detest. He had a pet squirrel as a boy and loves to watch squirrels. He finds them charming.
On the other hand, when he first began his business 12 years ago, and an equally adorable raccoon figured out how to depress a pipe to let the water out of a tank and ate about $6,000 worth of koi, it did not end well.
So what did Mr. Yaziciyan do?
“I’m not going to tell you,” Mr. Yaziciyan said. “I told my wife I took it to the Everglades.”
Mr. Yaziciyan has since made a practice of covering the ponds with shade cloth, netting or wire. It is not an aesthetic solution. And it doesn’t always get rid of his biggest problem: birds. Herons, which are a protected species, are a problem, as are crows, Mr. Yaziciyan wrote in an e-mail message, because they eat the eyes out of fish and snatch surface swimmers. Heron, with their rapierlike beaks, are adept killing machines.
“Koi are very expensive fish — you have a 14- or 15-inch koi, depending on the grade, it could be $50 or $2,000,” says Mr. Yaziciyan, whose own stock ranges from a more modest $5 to $500. “They go for the larger fish, your prize fish. They even kill fish they are unable to swallow. They pull it out of the water, eat its guts out.”
This eating-the-eyes-out part is casting a new light on the bucolic animal kingdom, Mr. Yaziciyan is told.
“I got a lot of blind fish,” Mr. Yaziciyan says.
Mr. Yaziciyan says he does not touch the heron. But he has gone after ravens, blue birds and crows with a net, banging their heads against a concrete or wood surface. It’s a quick death.
One visualizes a chirping cartoon bird, advising Snow White on an available share in the woods. We’re talking the bluebird of happiness, Mr. Yaziciyan. Isn’t it difficult to slam it against the concrete?
“Not really,” Mr. Yaziciyan says. “It’s a small bird. It may be a blue jay, maybe a blue bird with gray on it. I’ve seen them poke the eyes out of the fish. You gotta do what you gotta do. You got a $50 fish that is totally useless. No one will buy a fish with one eye. I got dozens of fish with one eye.”
The food chain is a brutal business. Or a natural one. Which brings us back to the artist with the groundhog problem. He was finally able to make a little bit of peace with shooting the woodchucks on his property by cooking and eating them. “It was a way of taking full responsibility for taking a life,” he says. “Almost like a spiritual journey.”
“Any number of local people offered up recipes,” the artist adds. “The guy who was doing some roofing work was Italian, and he described this wonderful recipe: essentially shallots, red wine, cured green olives, black pepper and rosemary. My father-in-law had a big helping. He declared it the best woodchuck he’d ever eaten.”
There Are Other Ways
JOHN HADIDIAN, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States, is skeptical when he hears of gardeners who claim they have tried everything to rid themselves of urban pests. He also cautions that gardeners who kill animals and birds may be breaking the law, noting that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, for example, protects most species of birds.
Killing animals often does not solve the problem. “Woodchucks are a classic case,” Mr. Hadidian says. “If you do nothing to alter the burrow system or to protect against reinvasion, it’s going to be back.”
Mr. Hadidian is the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife,” which offers information about wild animals as well as creative and humane methods of discouraging them from eating your plants. To protect corn from raccoons, who tend to go for it when it ripens, the book suggests leaving a radio “tuned to an all-night talk show” out in the garden on the nights just before harvest. Or one might try the more prosaic electrical fence.
For help, Mr. Hadidian suggests calling the society’s wildlife hotline, (203) 389-4411, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Eastern time. (It has a staff of two.)
There is also the approach offered by Catherine Wachs, a gardener who runs the Right Brain Design advertising company and lives in Larchmont, N.Y.: “I do what the Bible says: Leave the corners of your field unharvested for the poor and strangers among you.”
One of the comments following that article is asking me to crosspost it here:
I already posted one comment, so I don't want to appear rude by coming back and posting another, but here goes.
The problem that I am seeing with most of the people interviewed for this article is that they have taken up the trade of a hunter, yet they do so outside of the ethical tradition that governs the behavior of most American hunters. They kill in a thoughtless, sophomoric way.
As hunter myself who gets most of his family's meat by hunting, I say that killing garder snakes outdoors is absolutely inexcusable. Inside of your house, well that is understandable. I've been there. But killing a small, non-poisonous snake in it's native habitat simple because you find it 'gross' is morally bankrupt. Such a person should not be encouraged to own firearms at all.
Killing bluebirds for any reason is illegal all year round. Period. The guy with the koi farm should find a better way of covering his koi ponds. There are millions of American hunters who devote strict attention to following game laws, even at times when it is inconvenient to us. This guy thinks he's exempt for some reason? I'd like to see a game warden pay him a visit with a formal charge of violating federal game laws for every one of those bluebirds he killed. That's the same law and order that other hunters (including farmers with crops to protect) are presented with if we fail to mind our Ps and Qs and accidentally shoot a buck on a doe day.
With regard to pests that can be legally killed, I implore readers to make a distinction between their wants and their needs. If you seriously depend on a large garden, financially, to feed your family, then go ahead and shoot the woodchuck. But if you're just gardening a bit for fun and the woodchuck is ruining it, hold your fire. It's one thing when it's a question of your livelihood versus the woodchuck's. But when you kill an animal because it's ruining your fun, then you are effectively killing for fun. And that's just sick.
Now if you will be learning how to properly dress and butcher the woodchuck afterwards, that's a different story. Then you are also hunting for food and we do all need to eat.
When ethics are divorced from hunting, all you've really got is murder. Mainstream American hunters have been ingrained with a code of ethics that most other people are probably completely unaware of. If untrained adults are going to take up hunting to protect their gardens, it is absolutely essentially that they study ethics and game laws along with the instruction booklet that came with the rifle.
— Jackson Landers, Keswick, Virginia
Saw Deniz the other day, and she told me that it's "always illegal to kill animals". Well, no, so I reminded her of hamburgers. "Well, it's always illegal to kill wild animals!" No, I mentioned that people hunt. "Well, that's only legal if you're doing it for food, not for fun."
So we had a talk about how it's legal to do any number of things that maybe aren't ethical. (And no, I'm not a fan of the hunting-for-fun concept, nor the "killing snakes because they creep me out" idea.)
Guerrilla Gardening
By JON MOOALLEM
Just after sunset on one of the first mild nights of spring, Richard Reynolds parked his hatchback near a traffic circle in the London neighborhood of Hoxton. Tied to his roof were a potted honeysuckle and a dozen box hedge plants, spilling out of garbage bags. Trays of bright white Paris daisies filled the trunk, and cartons of variegated ivy were wedged in the passenger seat. Hipsters drank indifferently outside a nearby pub.
The car was swiftly unstuffed. Soon Reynolds and five accomplices were over a short black fence and onto a small, squalid crescent of land at a bend in the sidewalk. They were ankle-deep in food wrappers and beer bottles and the spindly overgrowth of a bullying bush that Reynolds — bent over, wearing work gloves and high black rubber boots — started clipping fervidly.
“The problem is, it got too leggy,” he said. “This is the kind of plant that needs to be thinned every year, otherwise it becomes a scraggly mess.” The shrub along the rear fence was in fine shape, however, and Reynolds imagined it could be pruned and incorporated into their new garden. “That’s a buddleja. A buddleja davidii. Its common name is a butterfly bush,” he explained. (He takes a horticulture course one day a week in Regent’s Park.) “It has huge, very pendulous blooms.”
Reynolds is 30, long-limbed and willowy, with a floppy pile of dark curls. For the next several hours, as he and his troops reclaimed this lost crumb of London, people — young and old, lucid and drunk — would pause on the sidewalk to stare or cheer them on. Many asked if this was what they suspected it must be: the vaguely political, very radical thing they’ve heard is happening around the city. And this being artsy Hoxton — “the Williamsburg of London,” as one American ex-pat put it to me — what seemed like every third passerby photographed the spectacle for his blog.
But here at the outset, trash was being handed out of the thicket, then sorted into bags of recyclables by more foot soldiers. Full dumpsters were rolled across the street and swapped for empty ones. Someone found a wallet. Reynolds stood up holding a stainless-steel sink. A young woman in a green jacket with horses printed all over it stopped to ask what they were doing.
“We’re gardening,” Reynolds told her.
“Who are you gardening for?”
“For everyone and ourselves,” he said. “We’re guerrilla gardeners.”
Reynolds defines guerrilla gardening as “the cultivation of someone else’s land without permission.” He didn’t invent the term or the tactic but has become, as he puts it, “a self-appointed publicist for the movement” and the breadth of impulses and ideologies behind it.
Last week he published a book, “On Guerrilla Gardening.” It’s a political history of people growing things where they shouldn’t — from Honduran squatters to the artists and students he credits with originating the term “guerrilla gardening” in New York City in the early ’70s. During the city’s financial crisis, the self-styled Green Guerillas began cultivating derelict lots around the Lower East Side, either by clipping barbed wire fences or chucking “seed bombs” over them — Christmas ornaments or condoms filled with tomato seeds, water and fertilizer. After early confrontations, the city ultimately gave in and legitimized many of their plots into one of the country’s first community-garden programs, staking a claim for green space before gentrification vaulted the value of all that abandoned land.
Today, rifling through the multitude of guerrilla-gardening Flickr pages and blogs — discovering all the action in Amsterdam, Calgary, Turin, Tokyo or Long Beach — you can almost start to see this kind of vigilante greening as the instinctual human response to city living. In “On Guerrilla Gardening,” Reynolds describes gardeners he has met around the world through his own blog, guerrillagardening.org. (Its forum, where guerrillas plan “troop digs” and exchange advice, now has more than 4,000 registered users.) These include a sunflower specialist in Brussels; a founder of an unsanctioned community garden currently fighting eviction from vacant lots in Berlin; and the San Franciscans who converted disused properties into vegetable gardens, even pirating absentee owners’ water. Reynolds’s book is also full of references to horticultural “sleeper cells” and “shock and awe” plantings, and culls tactical advice from the writings of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong — though “I think Mao comes across far more kindly than I intended him to,” he told me regretfully.
Reynolds has helped build 28 gardens around London over the last four years. Unlike many guerrillas I spoke to, he is not building big community gardens, growing food or hijacking neglected, privately owned land to critique the capitalist system. Instead, he is planting strictly ornamental arrangements of flowers and shrubs on roundabouts, roadsides, tree pits and other slivers of public land that have fallen into disrepair. He is fundamentally an aesthete. And at first glance, there’s a confounding innocence to it all. Yet Reynolds has managed to stir controversy and, very recently, found himself surrounded by the police. He is quickly becoming both a subculture celebrity (Adidas sent him a treatment for a guerrilla-gardening-themed ad campaign) and a public intellectual, challenging ideas about what it means to live in a city — simply by decorating one.
Reynolds says that he has gardened with several hundred guerrillas in London and now hears of actions he had nothing to do with planning. A few weeks before the dig in Hoxton, a new acquaintance asked for his help reforming a muddy median near Camden’s Hawley Arms pub — a famed Amy Winehouse haunt that burned in a huge fire in February. “It’s been described here, very inappropriately, as the 9/11 of the indie world,” Reynolds told me. In the spirit of healing, guerrillas replanted the area with hedging donated by a woman in Notting Hill. (Reynolds gets frequent donations of plants and cash and says he spent about $1,400 of his own money on gardening last year.) They planned to prune the hedges into topiary the shape of Winehouse’s hairdo.
Reynolds calls such neglected plots “orphaned land.” Sometimes, as is the case with the plot in Hoxton, each relevant city agency assumes another one is responsible for the upkeep of a particular patch. Orphaned land is an abundant, underutilized resource in the postindustrial city, as is the creative energy of people like Reynolds who would love to garden but can’t afford land of their own. That is, even in cities where land is scarce and expensive, substantial amounts of it are left derelict. Thus, guerrilla gardening mobilizes gardeners without land to take over land without gardeners. A space that previously meant nothing to anyone is turned into “a catalyst for community conversation,” Reynolds says, generating a feeling of shared ownership of the city.
By now, most of his energy is devoted to looking after about a half-dozen established plots, keeping his work there from reverting into hives of overgrowth and litter. He and his girlfriend, Lyla Patel, often tidy up or weed at night, on their way home from pubs and parties. Patel, who is 27 and grew up in London, told me that the only times strangers have ever struck up conversations with her on the street are when she’s gardening.
Patel and I took the tube to Hoxton together since Reynolds’s car was packed with plants. She lovingly described him as easily impassioned and distracted — a classic dilettante, if he weren’t also an incorrigible overachiever about everything. Reynolds and his brother were briefly signed to a record label as an electronic-music duo, and along with a friend, he silkscreens and sells a line of T-shirts. One afternoon, he told me he was thinking about starting a one-man painting-and-decorating business to earn extra cash. The next day, he had a Web site up and his first job, redoing a bathroom.+
“There’s always something to keep him occupied, and stressed,” Patel explained. “He pressures himself. He’s a perfectionist. But people are always proud of their gardens when they’ve worked hard on them. It’s just, Richard’s gardens are all over the city.” She smiled. “And he is a show-off.”
Christopher Woodward, director of London’s Museum of Garden History, told me that Reynolds “is a provocateur. He’s asking questions.” The museum recently held a party for Reynolds’s book, and late last month, it staged a debate among Reynolds, an academic and a landscape architect about guerrilla gardening and changing attitudes toward public space. “There is a real thirst to bring nature and the seasons back into the concrete city,” Woodward said. “Richard is one of a number of provocative, creative people in gardens, in horticulture, in public parks, who are genuinely changing the approach.” As it happens, Woodward took part in his first guerrilla action the week before we spoke, scattering sunflower seeds and tending to a downed tree. “We lifted the tree back up, and we all felt wonderful,” he told me. “There’s definitely a real kick, isn’t there, to digging up public land?”
In Hoxton, after an hour of filth-clearing, a promising bed of black soil started to materialize. “We’ve broken the back of it,” Reynolds said. He turned up some dirt with a pitchfork to check its depth. “The California poppy will absolutely love it,” he announced. Then, raising his voice, he directed everyone: “But let’s not do any more digging. I was just curious. Patience!”
Reynolds grew up gardening with his family in Devon and at boarding school in Exeter, where, even at age 8, he took over the shoddy plots of his less-enthusiastic classmates. After Oxford, he settled in the South London neighborhood of Elephant and Castle. He found a flat in a drab, concrete high-rise called Perronet House — a building managed by the borough government. It was the first time he’d lived in a place without a garden or even window boxes. So he set his sights on the raised-brick flower beds out front, about 80 feet across. A few willful periwinkle plants poked out of the trash and construction scrap.
In the fall of 2004, unsure if anyone would mind, Reynolds began yanking weeds from the beds in the middle of the night. He planted a few clippings from his mother’s garden and started blogging his experiment. Gradually, he built the space into a lively garden: “a quite ambitious” take, he says, on the traditional herbaceous border style. (He has entered the Perronet House beds in the “front garden” category of a borough-sponsored competition intended for private homeowners.) Soon, he started venturing farther into the neighborhood to remake other orphaned parcels. “I was doing it for myself,” he says. “I was doing it because I wanted to garden, and I was ashamed of the grottiness of the area I lived in. It was plain and simple selfish middle-class pride.”
The following year, the British news media discovered Reynolds’s blog. A burst of flattering coverage began. He had just been laid off from an advertising firm and now had the time, and the celebrity, to coordinate volunteers to create grander gardens in larger spaces. Over four nights in 2006, a total of 80 guerrillas converted a roughly 400-foot-long triangular median of unruly grass south of Westminster Bridge into what Reynolds now calls “our flagship”: an expansive fit of euphorbia and helleborus, as well as small willow, cherry and dogwood trees, all vaulting from a blanket of lavender. Once a year, guerrillas harvest the lavender and sew it into little pillows, which are sold to support more gardening. When Reynolds took me by one afternoon, the deep-red tulips had just opened, and he took pictures fervently for his blog. He uses many red plants, he said, and tries to capture them for the blog with a red double-decker bus or red phone booth in the background. “Red is very much London’s color,” he explained.
Reynolds still freelances in advertising and is compulsively fascinated by the way things are marketed. He is keenly aware of how politicized, how anti-establishment, plants are becoming — even lawful ones. “They’re being venerated,” he says, as “a solution” to many of society’s problems. Plants offset carbon emissions. They can fuel our cars. Community gardens become places to sit with friends in cities where doing so has increasingly necessitated buying a cappuccino. Urban agriculture promotes food security or supplies fresh vegetables to poor neighborhoods lacking grocery stores. Recently, the architect Fritz Haeg has been campaigning to replace American front lawns with crops, calling his new book, “Edible Estates,” “a radical intervention” against our “repressive streets of zombie lawn-lined monotony.”
Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says “tasted dirty,” Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature’s order; he gladly plants invasive species if they’re aesthetically appropriate to the setting. Instead, he seems to focus on guerrilla gardening as a socially subversive phenomenon, breaking us out of the unconstructive role we’ve cast ourselves in as citizens.
“There’s this feeling that someone’s going to be doing it for us,” he told me. We respect public space by not degrading it: not littering, not vandalizing. But we rarely consider what we might contribute to it. Consequently, the common areas of our cities wind up belonging to none of us rather than to all of us equally. As Andy Brown, a guerrilla gardener in Toronto, puts it: “If it makes sense to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls of your living room, it makes sense to put a fresh coat of flowers on your neighborhood, because they’re both places you live in.”
Reynolds accepts that cities can realistically spend only so much on horticulture. “We’re their solution to a lack of funding,” he told me. More important, he argues, guerrillas simply do some jobs better than government. Guerrillas are fleeter. They’re not bound up in safety regulations, forced to drag around “Men at Work” signs or to suffer through volunteer trainings or write grant proposals like legitimate volunteers. Several guerrillas told me they’re particularly proud to be bringing more imaginative plant combinations to roadsides than the city does, more artistry.
“I grew up singing in a cathedral where every little surface of all the medieval walls was carved in,” Reynolds said. “It looked like a place that was really special to people — lived in and loved.” His gardening is meant to communicate the same affectionate and collaborative investment in London. “I’m not against the state,” he told me. “I’m not an anarchist. I accept society more or less as it is. But there are chinks, there are flaws, there are anomalies in it. There are things that get overlooked, and I think guerrilla gardening can be a solution to that.
“It’s sort of the geek in me that says, Oh, no, hang on a minute,” he later added. “Let’s look at this again. Let’s reassess this. This could be so much better with a bit of imagination.”
Since he went public, Reynolds’s run-ins with municipal authorities have been infrequent but strange. Last summer, after the London Borough of Southwark suddenly decided to resume its own upkeep of the Perronet House beds, encroaching on Reynolds’s turf, Reynolds arranged to meet the borough’s horticulturists to discuss the issue. “They were all wearing dark sunglasses,” he says, and refused his invitation to come up to his flat and talk over tea. At one point, he says, they threatened to tear up his entire garden and generally behaved like “small-minded, stupid, paranoid, negative, aggressive idiots.”
Eventually, Reynolds rallied the building’s residents behind him and was given verbal permission to continue gardening outside Perronet House — and there only. The encounter persuaded him that hiding his identity, as many guerrillas do, would be a mistake, feeding the assumption that he was doing something destructive. Being upfront about his intentions seems to defuse conflict with authorities, he says, if only because it so thoroughly confuses them.
The week after I left London, however, a troupe of guerrillas were suddenly confronted by more than a half-dozen police officers while refurbishing a traffic circle outside Reynolds’s building. Reynolds was as forthcoming as ever (“I’ve put that flower bed in beneath those railings,” he tells the police in a video of the incident, laying it all on the table, “and we’ve got some nice forget-me-nots going there”) but was nevertheless threatened with arrest for “criminal damage.” The guerrillas retreated to his flat, where they spent an hour and a half with a bottle of red wine. Then, when the coast seemed clear, they began scampering out, two at a time, carrying purple primrose to finish the job.
Councillor David Noakes, who represents Reynolds’s ward in the London Borough of Southwark, told me: “Generally I’m supportive of what Richard’s doing. He’s providing an example of the kind of member of a community that we want.” And yet, Noakes stressed, guerrillas put the council in a complicated position. Though the borough wants to “accommodate” guerrilla gardening, it must also protect the health and safety of the public and limit its own liability to lawsuits. “I can understand that, to Richard, the council must sometimes appear unnecessarily bureaucratic and very conflicting in its views,” he said. “It’s a very unusual issue for the council. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of Richard Reynoldses.”
Still, Reynolds’s most frequent irritants and obstacles are more mundane. His plants are sometimes stolen. In winter, they are singed by salt used to de-ice roads. At St. George’s Circus, in a traffic island he has cultivated for three years, Reynolds has been engaged in a long duel with jaywalkers who regularly cut through his garden. Initially, he blocked them with a laurel hedge. They barged through it. So earlier this year, guerrillas installed “The Pebbly Concession to Suicidal Tramplers,” a narrow path through the garden to channel and contain the intruders. Yet when Reynolds took me by St. George’s Circus the day before the Hoxton dig, the place was a disaster.
The city was digging up water mains and had fenced off much of the island, blocking the Pebbly Concession. “The path is completely pointless now,” Reynolds whined. Jaywalkers had started to wear away a new trail, through some lavender and dangerously close to his azaleas. As we stood there, two kids in buzz cuts and hoodies came stamping through behind us.
“You cannot do that, please!” Reynolds suddenly yelped. “Get off my flower bed! You’ve just destroyed all the plants!” He was screaming now. “Walk on the pavement!” he said, adding an expletive.
The kids didn’t care. One swore back at him as he passed, and an elderly man with a walker approached from the same direction. “Oh, now he’s coming along with his walker,” Reynolds moaned. “What’s he going to do?”
Traffic swept around the circle. Reynolds paced and complained — the perfectionist beset by imperfections, the guerrilla gardener versus the guerrilla pedestrians, each refusing to stay within the lines. Soon he found one of the road crew’s striped barriers lying in his heather. He fixed the plank across the trail, leaning it against a cabbage palm: a blockade. He was back to being cheerful, impressed by his cleverness. He stepped back to look at it. Then he photographed it for his blog.
What other malfunctions of the modern city could autonomous activists fix? How far can guerrilla urbanism go?
In his book, Reynolds describes a group of London anarchists who engaged in “guerrilla benching,” installing their own wooden benches on sidewalks when a local government began removing benches from public space. In France, guerrilla repairmen built a clandestine workshop under the dome of the Panthéon and, over the next year, refurbished its clock. Recently, guerrilla knitters in New York and elsewhere have been wrapping traffic light poles in colorful, leg-warmer-like cozies.
Still, Reynolds acknowledges that with gardening — particularly the kind of persnickety ornamental gardens he’s so passionate about — he happens to have stumbled into a realm of guerrilla restoration that is almost perfectly unthreatening to everyone. People generally agree that, unlike squatters or graffiti, tulips and rosemary are beneficial appropriations of public space; they are pretty, particularly if they spring from a beer-sodden trench of weeds. In fact, a spokeswoman for the London Borough of Hackney, the borough in which the Hoxton roundabout is located, couldn’t readily tell me whether what Reynolds and his troops did there is technically illegal. “Gosh, I don’t know,” she said. “Environmental vandalism would be illegal, but it’s hard to argue that gardening is vandalism.”
Even the owner of the neighboring pub who stormed out to have a word with Reynolds that night tried to stress, again and again, that he had absolutely no problem with guerrilla gardening; he’s all for flowers. But the borough had been reprimanding him about the noisy crowds outside his bar, and he resented the gardeners for adding to the volume and endangering his business. Reynolds superciliously explained that they were actually helping his business — “We’re gentrifying the area, making it a more desirable place to hang out!” as he put it to me — infuriating the barman even more. But before long, everyone was back to work, unsheathing the boxwood from its garbage bags. A car slowed through the intersection, and from the crowded back seat a man hollered: “ARE YOU GUERRILLAS?” — enunciating each word as if he were shouting to natives from the bow of his galleon. When Patel and Reynolds called out “Yes” in unison, thumbs shot up around the car.
Soon packets of poppy seeds — remainders of a Gardens Illustrated promotion donated by the magazine — were being torn open and poured into a big red bucket. A young woman in a raincoat stopped to thank Reynolds for “the difference you’ve made in London and in the landscape” and to ask him if there was any chance he’d visit her neighborhood. “It’s really bad, really bad up there,” she said, like a weary citizen in a Marvel comic book. “My aim,” he told her, “is to encourage people to take the same approach that we have, and just get out and do it.”
By 10:30, two and a half hours after the guerrillas descended on that scrappy shred of land, there was indisputably a garden there. A double row of ivy ran behind the fence and, behind it, flanked by clumps of daisies, boxwood enclosed the butterfly bush. Reynolds raked up. Then, when no one was looking, he unceremoniously shook out the bucket of poppy seeds around the edges. “Done,” he told Patel. “It’s done.”
And one on the use of excessive force against wildlife - go check out the comments after the article.
Peter Rabbit Must Die
By JOYCE WADLER
THE homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life.
Given the size of the property — a 12-acre former horse farm — fencing was out of the question. He bought a Havahart live animal trap but did not catch a thing. And he worried that releasing woodchucks down the road would only be dumping the problem on a neighbor. So he moved on to that tried-and-true landlord’s tactic: harassment. He attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his old pickup truck and stuffed it into a burrow — not to kill the woodchucks, just to encourage them to move on. That didn’t work, either.
Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.
“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”
He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”
“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”
Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny. How many did he kill that summer?
“I stopped at 19,” he says. “One was a suicide. It realized its days were numbered and ran in front of a car.”
The artist’s story is not as unusual as some would like to believe. As summer closes in, gardeners around the country are starting to worry about the animals that may end up enjoying their roses and cucumbers more than they do. Any day now, they know, they may come upon a carrot patch ravaged by groundhogs, lettuce ransacked by rabbits and squirrels, or a massacre in the koi pond.
But for many gardeners — the tenderhearted ones, who pride themselves on their decency and compassion — killing pests, particularly those with big eyes, fluffy tails and cousins who work for Disney, could never be a solution of first resort.
“People who garden have an obvious love of life, a reverence for life, and to kill something in order to garden is very rough,” says Liz Krieg, who runs the Rising Sun Greenhouses and Landscape Company in Bethel, Vt., and who dispatches only the scarlet lily beetle.
City people tend to take up gardening in their yards or at their summer houses with a generous attitude toward summer’s bounty, ready to live and let live. The woodchucks want a few zucchini? No problem, there are enough to go around. The rabbits are decimating the lettuce? Get a humane trap and move them elsewhere.
Soon enough, though, they realize it’s not that simple. The animals do not take one or two tomatoes as if they’re in a greenmarket in the Hamptons; they go down the row sampling, so that everything is ruined. Or they uproot and destroy a crop, without eating a thing, in their search for insects and grubs. There is, in fact, a sameness to the stories the gardeners tell: “If they just had taken one head of lettuce, or a few strawberries — but they decimated the whole thing!” After a season of grueling labor and multiple attempts at benign deterrence, the sight of a trashed garden is often the last straw: the moment when a gentle gardener will suddenly go Rambo.
Such was the case with Susanne Williams, a retired supply officer for the Alaska Department of Transportation, who lives with her husband in Douglas, near Juneau. Gardening is a struggle in southeast Alaska, she says; there is not a lot of sun. But she and her husband have two gardens, one at their home overlooking the Gastineau Channel, the other at the local community garden near the Mendenhall Glacier. They give much of their produce to charity and put up mesh at home in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out porcupines.
Five years ago there were serious animal problems at the community garden — black bear, deer, beaver — but “the worst pest of all was the porcupine,” Ms. Williams says. “The kindhearted would trap them and drive them 10 or 15 miles away, until one of the forest people said they just came back.”
It reached a point, Ms. Williams says, when gardeners were so frustrated that at least 30 of the 150 plots were empty.
“So finally, four years ago, we put an electric fence all around this big field, but the porcupines then decide to burrow under the fence,” she says. “They’re ingenious. So we had to put rocks down and pour cement.”
Even then, a porcupine managed to get in. And when she saw it, “strolling along, munching away,” she could stand no more.
“He was after my carrot crop,” she explains. “I said, I just cannot handle this anymore. He sees me and tries to wander off, but they can’t run very fast. I got him with the sledgehammer. He tried to dodge me, but I got him on the head.”
And no, she hasn’t lost any sleep over it.
“It was sad, but I am tired of being the fancy kitchen for critters,” she says. She has a friend in the area who has “just given up” on being kind to the animals: “He goes after them with a pitchfork and puts them in his compost pile. I don’t think the PETA people would like him much.”
She adds: “Doesn’t the spinach scream when it boils? I think probably all living things have some scream going on. We’re all predators, no matter whether we’re animals, mineral, birds or fish, and that’s part of it.”
Taking pest control into your own hands, of course, is no simple matter. There are the ethical and emotional issues, and while it is often legal to kill a pest, there are innumerable federal, state and municipal laws and regulations that may make it illegal.
There would seem, at first, to be many alternatives to killing. Besides mesh and electric fences, there are nets to cast over trees and gardens; foul scents with names like Not Tonight, Deer; and home remedies like sprinkling cayenne pepper around the tomatoes and dumping used cat litter into woodchuck holes. There are scarecrows in the north and fake alligators in the south, and household pets to scare predators away or to do the gardeners’ dirty work. There are capture-and-release traps.
But none of these methods work all the time, and some, depending on the species you are trying to catch and the area in which you live, may not even be legal. The New York State Environmental Protection Law, for example, forbids anyone but a state Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator from transporting a wild animal, which puts the kibosh on the use of capture-and-release traps.
Trapping and moving animals may not be in their best interests, either: a backyard suburban squirrel, transported to a forest, is easy prey for hawks and foxes, said John Hadidian, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States and the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife.” (The book suggests tolerance as its first choice for everything from bats to rats.)
And releasing an animal in a more familiar setting may not be in your neighbors’ best interests.
“We have yet to find anyone in outlying areas who says, ‘We love raccoons, please bring your humanely trapped critters here and let them go,’ ” says Wendell Martin, a retired engineer who has a five-acre garden in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise. Raccoons have uprooted and upended his water lilies to find snails. Mr. Martin finally borrowed a .22 and shot them. It was not an ethical problem for him, he says — the animals are overpopulated in his area — but it was not easy emotionally. (This year there seem to be fewer of them, and he has been trying to protect his plants with wire mesh.)
Then there are the difficulties that can arise when transporting a wild animal.
Jessica DuLong, a Brooklyn writer and marine engineer, managed to grow a fruit-bearing cherry tree on her roof, but even in the wake of what she calls the Great Cherry Massacre of 2007 she was not interested in punishing the squirrels who preyed on it. She trapped one in a live animal trap and set out to Prospect Park with good intentions.
Unfortunately, the squirrel had no way of knowing this. It threw itself against the walls of the cage with such ferocity it cut itself; it defecated; it ran back and forth inside the long cage in a frenzy so that the cage flipped up and down like a manic miniature seesaw. New Yorkers, seeing a fluffy tail in distress, yelled at the human involved.
“This entire class of preschool kids was out in one of their little preschool wagons, and the squirrel is looking rabid and bleeding at the mouth,” she says. “It was not what I had in mind when I started this humanitarian project.”
Not all city people, of course are so sweetly disposed to cute rodents. Joanna Lennig is an executive headhunter who lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. As a 10-year-old she was stunned to see her mother, “an incredibly polite, retiring, WASP lady,” attacking a woodchuck in the vegetable garden with a shovel.
“You know that body posture someone has when they’re using a pickax,” Ms. Lennig says. “She was just enraged. We just talked about this recently — being WASPs, we’d never talked about it. We were a family who canned the corn and canned the beans and really put food aside for the winter, so having an animal go through the green beans, she was furious. She said she’d had it.”
Ms. Lennig herself has no sentimental attachment to squirrels. About three years ago she saw signs of digging in the rooftop garden of her brownstone, which has pots of blueberry bushes, grape vines, tomatoes and peppers, as well as flowering plants, and is a regular stop on garden tours. She was unconcerned by this evidence of squirrel interlopers until the day she went up to find the garden destroyed, the blueberry bush razed, the tomato plants eaten through.
“There was a wow factor,” Ms. Lennig says. “Like when one looks out at the aftermath of a really, really, really destructive thunderstorm and says, ‘Look at that tree branch on the Volvo.’ ” Ms. Lennig went “straight to rage.” She and her husband bought a Havahart trap and captured a squirrel, then realized they did not have a plan. Transporting it to a nearby park didn’t seem an effective solution. Squirrels, they had heard, were territorial; it would only come back.
They did, however, as conscientious environmentalists, have a large rain barrel on the roof, which they used to water the garden. Who first came up with the idea of drowning, Ms. Lennig cannot recall, but it was her husband who handled the first executions. The trap, which was long and narrow, fit perfectly in the barrel.
Ms. Lennig has yet to be able to deal with the removal of the corpse, which is then thrown into the garbage. But she and her husband are now so comfortable with this form of pest control that when they visited Ms. Lennig’s in-laws at their lakefront property last year, where squirrels were climbing on the deck and ravaging the planters, they offered to drown them.
“My husband and I said, ‘We’ll take them to the lake,’ ” she says, “but our in-laws were having none of that. We had to get in the car and drive them five miles away. I spent the entire weekend like a soccer mom, driving squirrels around.”
Isn’t drowning cruel?
No, Ms. Lennig says. She recalls reading that you lose consciousness and then your heart stops; it’s actually one of the nicer ways to go.
A reporter remembers reading just the opposite (and the Humane Society agrees that drowning is inhumane).
“Listen,” Ms. Lennig says. “I’m a former attorney. What do I know?”
Few who have made the leap from pacifism to search-and-destroy missions are this open on the subject. Who, after all, wants to risk being labeled a hardened animal killer? There are, however, those willing to take the heat. Boldest are those who admit to killing garden pests simply because they are annoying.
Dan Rattiner is the founder of Dan’s Papers and the author of “In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities.” He has a house in East Hampton, and for the last three years he has hired exterminators to get rid of the carpenter bees, which, he is well aware, do not sting.
So what do they do?
“They sort of follow you around,” Mr. Rattiner says. “They’re curious, like Curious George bees.”
That sounds sort of sweet.
No, Mr. Rattiner says.
“You can’t sit outside — the carpenter bees come over to see what you’re eating,” he says. “They don’t land on you, it’s not like menacing, it’s like having small children that aren’t yours. You just want them gone. There’s no other way to do it, and I feel very badly about it. I don’t know why they keep coming back. You’d think they’d talk to each other about what happened last year.”
Many gardeners are able to kill only one species.
“If I see a spider, I would never kill it,” says Jessica Melville, a nurse in Woodstock, Vt. “We have woodchucks in the yard; they don’t bother me at all.”
But Ms. Melville, who lives with her husband, Hunter, and two sons, is terrified of snakes. Unfortunately, her home, an 1850 farmhouse, is built into a stone wall that the local milk snakes and garter snakes love. Ms. Melville’s husband, who co-founded cyberrentals.com, explained to her that those snakes are harmful only to the insects they catch, but no matter. Before kneeling down in the perennial bed, Ms. Melville used to do what her family called her snake dance, jumping up and down, because when those snakes heard the pounding, they slithered away. If she happened to see a snake, she’d retreat into the house, and that would be it for that day’s gardening.
The Melvilles tried a granulated repellent called Snake Away. It didn’t work, so Mr. Melville, who occasionally hunts birds, bought his wife a 20-gauge shotgun. Although some might think a snake would be a difficult target, it is not. Often, when a predator is near, a snake will freeze.
“I just went up really close,” Ms. Melville says. “I was probably five feet from it. The first shot I missed. The second time I got it and then it was: ‘Oh, this is great! One less snake I have to deal with.’ ”
Ms. Melville has been shooting snakes for the last three years and estimates that she has killed about 15. But she’s killing snakes that are eating bugs? Doesn’t that distress her?
“No,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just a happier gardener.”
Second thoughts? Regrets? Nightmares?
“Nope, never,” Ms. Melville says. “I’m just glad they’re gone.”
Regrets are even rarer among those whose livelihoods are threatened by pests.
Oskian Yaziciyan lives in Homestead, Fla., about a 20-minute drive north of Key Largo, where he runs Goldfish & Koi U.S.A., a two-and-a-half-acre ornamental fish and water lily farm. He has great feelings of affection for some of the animals other people detest. He had a pet squirrel as a boy and loves to watch squirrels. He finds them charming.
On the other hand, when he first began his business 12 years ago, and an equally adorable raccoon figured out how to depress a pipe to let the water out of a tank and ate about $6,000 worth of koi, it did not end well.
So what did Mr. Yaziciyan do?
“I’m not going to tell you,” Mr. Yaziciyan said. “I told my wife I took it to the Everglades.”
Mr. Yaziciyan has since made a practice of covering the ponds with shade cloth, netting or wire. It is not an aesthetic solution. And it doesn’t always get rid of his biggest problem: birds. Herons, which are a protected species, are a problem, as are crows, Mr. Yaziciyan wrote in an e-mail message, because they eat the eyes out of fish and snatch surface swimmers. Heron, with their rapierlike beaks, are adept killing machines.
“Koi are very expensive fish — you have a 14- or 15-inch koi, depending on the grade, it could be $50 or $2,000,” says Mr. Yaziciyan, whose own stock ranges from a more modest $5 to $500. “They go for the larger fish, your prize fish. They even kill fish they are unable to swallow. They pull it out of the water, eat its guts out.”
This eating-the-eyes-out part is casting a new light on the bucolic animal kingdom, Mr. Yaziciyan is told.
“I got a lot of blind fish,” Mr. Yaziciyan says.
Mr. Yaziciyan says he does not touch the heron. But he has gone after ravens, blue birds and crows with a net, banging their heads against a concrete or wood surface. It’s a quick death.
One visualizes a chirping cartoon bird, advising Snow White on an available share in the woods. We’re talking the bluebird of happiness, Mr. Yaziciyan. Isn’t it difficult to slam it against the concrete?
“Not really,” Mr. Yaziciyan says. “It’s a small bird. It may be a blue jay, maybe a blue bird with gray on it. I’ve seen them poke the eyes out of the fish. You gotta do what you gotta do. You got a $50 fish that is totally useless. No one will buy a fish with one eye. I got dozens of fish with one eye.”
The food chain is a brutal business. Or a natural one. Which brings us back to the artist with the groundhog problem. He was finally able to make a little bit of peace with shooting the woodchucks on his property by cooking and eating them. “It was a way of taking full responsibility for taking a life,” he says. “Almost like a spiritual journey.”
“Any number of local people offered up recipes,” the artist adds. “The guy who was doing some roofing work was Italian, and he described this wonderful recipe: essentially shallots, red wine, cured green olives, black pepper and rosemary. My father-in-law had a big helping. He declared it the best woodchuck he’d ever eaten.”
There Are Other Ways
JOHN HADIDIAN, the director of urban wildlife programs for the Humane Society of the United States, is skeptical when he hears of gardeners who claim they have tried everything to rid themselves of urban pests. He also cautions that gardeners who kill animals and birds may be breaking the law, noting that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, for example, protects most species of birds.
Killing animals often does not solve the problem. “Woodchucks are a classic case,” Mr. Hadidian says. “If you do nothing to alter the burrow system or to protect against reinvasion, it’s going to be back.”
Mr. Hadidian is the primary author of “Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife,” which offers information about wild animals as well as creative and humane methods of discouraging them from eating your plants. To protect corn from raccoons, who tend to go for it when it ripens, the book suggests leaving a radio “tuned to an all-night talk show” out in the garden on the nights just before harvest. Or one might try the more prosaic electrical fence.
For help, Mr. Hadidian suggests calling the society’s wildlife hotline, (203) 389-4411, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Eastern time. (It has a staff of two.)
There is also the approach offered by Catherine Wachs, a gardener who runs the Right Brain Design advertising company and lives in Larchmont, N.Y.: “I do what the Bible says: Leave the corners of your field unharvested for the poor and strangers among you.”
One of the comments following that article is asking me to crosspost it here:
I already posted one comment, so I don't want to appear rude by coming back and posting another, but here goes.
The problem that I am seeing with most of the people interviewed for this article is that they have taken up the trade of a hunter, yet they do so outside of the ethical tradition that governs the behavior of most American hunters. They kill in a thoughtless, sophomoric way.
As hunter myself who gets most of his family's meat by hunting, I say that killing garder snakes outdoors is absolutely inexcusable. Inside of your house, well that is understandable. I've been there. But killing a small, non-poisonous snake in it's native habitat simple because you find it 'gross' is morally bankrupt. Such a person should not be encouraged to own firearms at all.
Killing bluebirds for any reason is illegal all year round. Period. The guy with the koi farm should find a better way of covering his koi ponds. There are millions of American hunters who devote strict attention to following game laws, even at times when it is inconvenient to us. This guy thinks he's exempt for some reason? I'd like to see a game warden pay him a visit with a formal charge of violating federal game laws for every one of those bluebirds he killed. That's the same law and order that other hunters (including farmers with crops to protect) are presented with if we fail to mind our Ps and Qs and accidentally shoot a buck on a doe day.
With regard to pests that can be legally killed, I implore readers to make a distinction between their wants and their needs. If you seriously depend on a large garden, financially, to feed your family, then go ahead and shoot the woodchuck. But if you're just gardening a bit for fun and the woodchuck is ruining it, hold your fire. It's one thing when it's a question of your livelihood versus the woodchuck's. But when you kill an animal because it's ruining your fun, then you are effectively killing for fun. And that's just sick.
Now if you will be learning how to properly dress and butcher the woodchuck afterwards, that's a different story. Then you are also hunting for food and we do all need to eat.
When ethics are divorced from hunting, all you've really got is murder. Mainstream American hunters have been ingrained with a code of ethics that most other people are probably completely unaware of. If untrained adults are going to take up hunting to protect their gardens, it is absolutely essentially that they study ethics and game laws along with the instruction booklet that came with the rifle.
— Jackson Landers, Keswick, Virginia
Saw Deniz the other day, and she told me that it's "always illegal to kill animals". Well, no, so I reminded her of hamburgers. "Well, it's always illegal to kill wild animals!" No, I mentioned that people hunt. "Well, that's only legal if you're doing it for food, not for fun."
So we had a talk about how it's legal to do any number of things that maybe aren't ethical. (And no, I'm not a fan of the hunting-for-fun concept, nor the "killing snakes because they creep me out" idea.)
