Five years ago, it would have been more likely that I’d be turning out for Chelsea Football Club than attending the RHS Chelsea flower show, let alone building a garden there. As a promising young footballer, horticulture was not part of my vocabulary; pittosporum would have sounded more like a potion than a plant, and I remember feeling extremely offended when someone called me a guerrilla gardener – though it was quickly explained to me that I was not being likened to a hairy mammal in the wild.
Nonetheless, this week the organisation Grow2Know and I are showing our first garden at the Chelsea flower show. As a relatively new gardener, I’ve experienced just how magical it can be. Yet I can’t help but feel uncomfortable with its narrative and direction. The five-day festival on the banks of the Thames – attended by royals, crowded with floral marquees, and where a glass of Pimm’s costs £7.80 – has never felt like it was meant for the likes of me. Despite living just 10 minutes down the road, the show feels like a completely different world to the one where I grew up.
While gardening was never a term used in the Hayden-Smith household, my late mother’s appreciation of and trust in nature always fascinated me. As a single mother to four of us living in a council house, she did bloody well. Sibling squabbles would often be defused by using the natural world as a distraction. “Look at all the colours in the sunset. How many can you see? Can you see the trees dance in the wind? What do you think the birds are saying to each other?” Her reliance on and relationship with nature had a profound impact on me – as subconscious as it may have been at the time.
But it was after a tragedy that I found gardening to be a form of solace. The night of 14 June 2017 changed my life for ever. In the early hours of that Wednesday morning, the Grenfell Tower blaze took the lives of 72 people – neighbours, friends and, heartbreakingly, children. Living nearby, I was distraught – completely broken. I took to the streets to be among others in my attempt to find comfort or some peace of mind. What I stumbled into changed my perspective entirely.
With no thought or plan, I channelled my energy into greening and beautifying a barren, unloved community space. I honestly didn’t have a clue what I was doing but that didn’t matter. I journeyed to every garden centre and plant nursery within reach, asking for plants to be donated to our reclaimed community space. The planting was all very much an experiment, but that is the way with nature – there really is no absolute right or wrong. The response was overwhelming. People would walk past and share a smile or some conversation. Numbers were exchanged and group chats were created. Dates and times were set for organised gatherings in the garden where people could cook food, play music and garden.
The Grenfell Garden of Peace, as it came to be known, had such positive and powerful effects on the people who visited that we went on to reclaim other spaces. Guerrilla gardening showed me the power of people, the essence and importance of community and the healing and unifying potential of nature. And it showed me that you can communicate your values through a garden.
When I told people that one day we would take guerrilla gardening to Chelsea, they looked at me as though I was mad. But here we are, exhibiting our garden at the RHS Chelsea flower show. Hands Off Mangrove by Grow2Know is purposely multi-layered in its messaging. The garden is spreading the seeds planted in 1970 by the defiant and brave Mangrove Nine, who stood up against police racism and fought for justice and a more positive future.
The brutal, stark mangrove sculpture in the garden has nine roots reaching into the ground – each representing a Mangrove Nine defendant. Made with corten steel, it aims to raise awareness of the detrimental impact we are having on the world as we continue to cut down our trees for profit. The build of the garden has been a community effort, and shows what can be done when people come to pull together to do something positive.
If visitors only take one thing from the garden, I hope it is the awareness that we are all a community. The Mangrove Nine were supported by people from all walks of life in their fight for justice. Just like the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill that once welcomed in everyone on All Saints Road, this garden is a place to celebrate our differences and share our stories, knowledge and history. The hope is that one day we can come together as a community, not just to respond to a tragedy or fight an injustice but for the future generations who will have to live with the consequences of our actions today. Surely that’s not an unreasonable ask.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith is the founder of Grow2Know and a former footballer
