To protect the Palestinian mountain gazelle is to protect the land. To fight for its survival is to fight for Palestine's liberation-free, whole, and uncolonized.
French guerrilla gardens transform urban landscapes, reclaiming neglected spaces to build community, support biodiversity, and promote susta
by Grant Brown, Thu 3 Jul 2025
Citizens reclaim neglected public spaces across France by creating French guerrilla gardens that build community and support biodiversity.
In France’s bustling cities, a quiet revolution is taking root. A growing movement of urban gardeners is transforming abandoned lots, forgotten corners, and concrete spaces into lively green oases. Known as French guerrilla gardens, these unauthorized green spaces are sprouting up across the country, driven by passionate citizens reclaiming public land to benefit their communities and the environment.
Leading this green revolution is Ophélie Damblé, a 35-year-old gardening author and influencer who goes by the online moniker Ta Mère Nature. With over 243,000 Instagram followers and a thriving YouTube channel, Damblé has become one of the most recognizable faces of France’s burgeoning guerrilla gardening movement.
French guerrilla gardens are grassroots initiatives where citizens plant flowers, vegetables, and herbs in neglected urban areas without official permission. This form of urban agriculture represents a peaceful act of civil disobedience against what Damblé calls “excessive concreting” in cities. While technically unauthorized, these projects often receive tacit approval from local authorities, who recognize their benefits to community well-being and urban biodiversity.
Damblé operates a neighborhood nursery at Cité Fertile, a former freight station in Pantin, and has been a vocal advocate for this movement since she began sharing gardening videos in 2017. For her, green guerrilla warfare is a tool for getting involved in greening. It’s about reclaiming public space in a completely spontaneous way.
The French guerrilla garden movement is about more than just beautifying urban spaces. These gardens serve multiple purposes, from fostering social connections to supporting local ecosystems.
Guerrilla gardens unite people, creating spaces where neighbors can connect and collaborate. Damblé emphasizes that these projects often start as small, unauthorized efforts but can evolve into officially recognized community spaces. She notes that what is interesting is when residents begin taking care of the space. Then, one can think about making it official by setting up an association to safeguard the garden.
Urban areas often lack green spaces to support pollinators like bees and butterflies. Guerrilla gardeners help provide essential food sources for these vital species by planting melliferous plants that produce nectar.
The French guerrilla garden movement draws inspiration from international successes like those of Los Angeles activist Ron Finley. In 2010, Finley planted vegetables in a neglected strip of land, an act of civil disobedience that initially resulted in fines. However, his efforts garnered widespread media attention and led to legal changes, highlighting the lack of access to fresh produce in poorer neighborhoods.
Damblé parallels Finley’s work and the growing momentum of guerrilla gardening in France. They are trying to organize urban farms to help people understand all the benefits that plants can bring. It’s not just about plants—it is about social links, food, biodiversity, and creating sustainable urban spaces.
Se also: Guerrilla Gardening and Seed Bombs – How to Get Started
As a guide for aspiring guerrilla gardeners, Damblé emphasizes the importance of strategic planning and community involvement in urban greening initiatives. According to her, success begins with careful plant selection. Plants must withstand urban conditions and support local ecosystems, highlighting pollinator-friendly options such as lavender and sunflowers as particularly effective choices.
Damblé recommends using planters or raised beds to address soil quality concerns in urban areas. This approach circumvents potential soil contamination issues and provides garden placement and maintenance flexibility. The expert also endorsed using seed bombs—an innovative technique combining seeds, compost, clay, and water. These biodegradable projectiles can effectively green areas that are otherwise difficult to access or lack nutrients.
The French guerrilla garden movement attracts diverse participants, from schoolchildren to business professionals and retirees. Damblé’s workshops at Cité Fertile draw people from all walks of life, united by their shared passion for gardening and urban renewal.
French cities are increasingly adapting to this citizen-led initiative. Some municipalities now offer permits for urban gardening projects, recognizing these spaces’ value to their communities. This shift reflects a growing understanding of urban agriculture’s role in creating more sustainable and livable cities.
For Damblé, gardening is more than just a hobby—it is a universal language that brings people together. She finds that people always find a way of understanding each other when they talk about plants.
As French guerrilla gardens flourish, they demonstrate how citizen action can drive positive environmental change. Urban residents reclaim their cities, foster community connections through these green spaces, and make France’s urban landscapes more resilient and environmentally friendly.
Willow would emit more climate pollution annually than more than 99.7% of all single point sources in the country. It’s estimated that the oil from Willow, when burned, would add more than 280 million metric tons of climate pollution to the atmosphere over the next 30 years — equivalent to the annual emissions from 76 coal-fired power plants. Willow is a climate disaster we just can’t afford.
Thank you for the question. I love nature, so I write haikus based on living things. Since there is a restriction that photos must be included, there are many haikus of plants. When I was a student, I was involved in an environmental movement and wrote flyers, which gave me practice in concisely summarizing sentences. That's why I'm good at short sentences.
The world’s longest serving environment correspondent explains the origins of a slow and continuing journey
It all began with Högertrafikomläggningen, Swedish for “the right-hand traffic reorganisation”.
On 3 September 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. The change mainly took place at night, but in Stockholm and Malmö all traffic stopped for most of the weekend while intersections were reconfigured.
So sweet was the resulting city air that weekend that environmental enthusiasm went sky high. It was a moment that would change the world.
Three months later Sweden, citing air and other pollution, asked the UN to hold the first-ever international environmental conference, initiating a process that would lead to a groundbreaking gathering in its capital in 5 June 1972, the 50th anniversary of which will be marked next week. This was the beginning of a long and slow struggle to find and agree global solutions to these newly understood global environment problem. Twenty years later, the Rio conference would follow in the same month, kicking off UN climate summits, the most recent of which was held in Glasgow last autumn.
And yet critical mistakes were made at this early juncture. Progress, as we know, has been glacial in the years since. Now, looking back at the first steps on that journey, it’s hard not to see that, although in there were so many issues the conference got right, there were also some crucial issues it got wrong.
The Stockholm conference – held in the city’s Folkets Hus the site of both a former prison and a theatre specialising in farces – gave green issues international import. In the 1960s, environmental issues had seemed local, not global. In Britain, for example, the last of the great London smogs killed 750 people in 1962, while tragedy struck four years later in Aberfan, Wales, with the collapse of a colliery spoil tip. In Japan, people wore masks against air pollution. There was drought in the Sahel. And in 1969 a passing train ignited oil in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, setting it ablaze.
But this was also a decade in which there were early stirrings of revolt against the environmental destruction. The World Wildlife Fund launched in 1961 with a special issue of the Daily Mirror carrying the front-page headline “DOOMED”. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring savaged pesticides the next year, and in 1969 an undergraduate Prince Charles first entered the fray, lobbying the then British prime minister, Harold Wilson, about Atlantic salmon at an event at the Finnish embassy.
But these were isolated voices, denounced and dismissed by the powerful. Carson said the US chemical industry wanted to return to “the dark ages” where “insects and vermin would once again inherit the Earth”. The then US agriculture secretary wrote to former US President Dwight Eisenhower, saying that since Carson was unmarried, despite being “attractive”, she was “probably a communist”.
The plan for an international conference in Stockholm initially had so little support that it was dismissively called “the Swedish matter” at the UN. It took two years of lobbying, against UK and French opposition, before the general assembly backed the proposal. As it happened, this (January 1970) was when I was told by a far-sighted editor at the Yorkshire Post that we needed to be covering this stuff and my long stint on the environment beat – the longest in the world as far as I am aware – began.
A new film rejects the popular narrative and recasts the former president, 96, as hugely prescient thinker, particularly on climate change
From the article:
“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”
Will’s brother, Jim, agrees. “A question folks should be asking themselves is: what catastrophes would have befallen this country had anyone other than Jimmy Carter been at the helm during that critical time in the late 1970s?”
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One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching documentaries like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that Carter was right on asking us to drive less, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to focus on conservation and renewable energy. Not only was Carter’s vision a path not taken, it was a path mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House, politicized the environmental movement and painted it as a fringe endeavor. [...]
