Since it made national headlines in 2010, this gardening practice has remained part of Victoria’s environmental activism scene
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
It should come as no surprise that the University of Victoria has a long history of environmentally-focused student activism. UVic was recently ranked second by Times Higher Education among universities globally — and first in Canada — when it comes to promoting sustainable cities and communities.
However, the institution and its students have not always seen eye-to-eye on sustainability practices on campus. Beneath the surface, there is a significant history of activism and protest — both on campus and in greater Victoria — challenging the underuse of land in the community.
A recurring practice in local environmental activism is guerrilla gardening. Over the past fifteen years — from small class projects, to large-scale demonstrations including a student arrest — guerrilla gardeners have made their presence known in the community.
What is guerrilla gardening?
Guerrilla gardening is a form of urban environmental activism, where people cultivate gardens on unused green spaces — specifically, spaces that do not belong to them. For city-dwellers, the ever-expanding concrete jungles often leave much to be desired when it comes to accessible green spaces where useful produce can be grown. Despite lack of space, many aren’t willing to give up their gardening dreams. Guerrilla gardening offers an alternative: making use of these spaces, even if it means digging in a legal gray area.
The term was coined in the 1970s by gardening activist Liz Christy and her group — the Green Guerillas. Based in New York, the Green Guerrillas were inspired to help bring food security to inner-city communities, who were suffering the effects of an economic recession. They used seed bombs — packages of seeds, compost, and soil — to encourage natural growth in neglected land within the city. One of their guerrilla gardening projects, known now as the Liz Christy Garden, still stands today. It is New York City’s oldest community garden, and is protected by the New York City Parks Department.
For some, guerrilla gardening may be done simply to make their neighbourhood a more pleasant and beautiful place to live by encouraging biodiversity, and giving positive purpose to unused land. For others, however, it is an anti-colonial act meant to address food security concerns in local communities, and challenge the institutions and systems that decide who is allowed to make use of land, and why.
‘Food Not Lawns’
In late March 2010, Victoria’s most significant instance of guerrilla gardening took place on UVic’s quad, in front of the McPherson Library. What began as a protest over a lack of accessible gardening spaces ended in roughly $10 000 in damages, the lockdown of the Administration Services Building (ASB), and the arrest of at least one student.
Throughout the protest, a group that identified themselves as the Food Not Lawns Collective repeatedly dug up the lawn in front of the McPherson Library and installed a series of gardens –– planted with edible produce and native plants. Each time, the garden was subsequently bulldozed by UVic, and the space was reverted back to its original form.
During the height of these tensions, an estimated crowd of 125 students and supporters had gathered at the garden, where one student was arrested after refusing to move for maintenance teams, sent by UVic to remove the garden beds.
Later, another crowd gathered outside the ASB, resulting in Campus Security (CSEC) locking down the building. A statement released by UVic in 2010 said that staff within the building were concerned for their own safety, after members of Food Not Lawns made attempts to force their way into the building.
At their core, these actions were about land use and food security. Food Not Lawns spokesperson Matt Christie told Saanich News in 2010 that it was time UVic students took ownership of land that they paid fees to access. The group argued that tuition-paying students should have a larger role in determining what university grounds were used for.
The protests made both local and national headlines, and were reported on in publications such as the Times Colonist, CBC, and the Globe and Mail.
Jenna Rudolph, a former UVic student who had already graduated at the time, was heavily involved in the protests. They played an active role in planting the garden beds, spent a night camping out on the site, and ended up being escorted off campus by police.
Reflecting on what had inspired them and their peers to take action in 2010, Rudolph noted that the protests took place shortly after the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, and that there was a large overlap between the people who protested the Olympics and those present at the UVic quad.
“I think a lot of people were really hyped because the Vancouver Olympics were happening.… Most people who were involved in the garden were involved in protesting the Olympics,” said Rudolph. “I think we just had a lot of energy for anti-colonial work, and saw the connection [between both protests] in terms of it being an anti-colonial struggle.”
They said that the message that Food Not Lawns shared back in 2010 — food security among students and others in the UVic community — is still relevant today. In the 2023-2024 academic year, the Campus Community Garden (CCG) donated over 900 lbs. of locally-grown produce to the UVSS Food Bank. Despite these efforts, CCG noted that food security and sovereignty continue to be issues for UVic students. According to statistics kept by the UVSS, over 400 students use their Food Bank each week.
“There are still definitely land struggles happening…. If UVic was doing things differently with the land that they owned, that would be great,” said Rudolph.
Rudolph admitted, however, that they have some regrets about how the group communicated their anti-colonial message.
“I, at this point in my life, would approach it really differently. I think we did a few things wrong,” they said. “I think we were all young, naive, 20-something kids …with a lot of energy and [if] we saw anything as part of the system we were trying to take down, we would just do it with that kind of energy. I think that upset a lot of people.”
Rudolph said that there was a distinct lack of Indigenous voices within what was intended to be an anti-colonial movement. Today, they look back at the movement as a “white attempt” at solving the problem, and said if they were able to do it over, they would have tried harder to bring Indigenous friends and members of the community into the conversation.
Building good soil
It has been fifteen years since the Food Not Lawns protests. In the time since, guerrilla gardeners have remained a consistent part of the environmental activist ecosystem both at the university and in the broader Victoria community.
Haultain Common, a community garden on the corner of Haultain Street and Asquith Street, was created by Margot Johnston and Rainey Hopewell in an effort to better their community by increasing access to food. While it is officially sanctioned by the city now, it began as a guerrilla operation.
According to a Victoria News article written in 2012, the two had already been operating the garden for four years while navigating outdated Victoria bylaws. They had been waiting several years for the City of Victoria to create a boulevard garden bylaw, which would officially sanction their community garden. In the meantime, they continued to tend the garden — without an express legal right to do so.
Today, the City of Victoria does not require residents to obtain permission for boulevard gardens, and has provided a set of guidelines for prospective urban gardeners to follow while creating their own community gardens. These guidelines were formally adopted in 2016, though had been allowed in the interim since 2014. Residents that are interested in building a community garden are encouraged to contact BC One Call at 1-800-474-6886 for help locating potentially dangerous gas and power lines.
Discussions around land use continue to be relevant not just in greater Victoria, but in the UVic community as well. Members of the CCG at UVic brought similar questions surrounding UVic’s land-use forward when speaking to the Martlet in 2014. They shared that, since the university reserved the right to disband the garden at any time without the guarantee of immediate relocation, planning for the future of the CCG was very difficult. They had already been relocated in 2011 to make room for a new university development.
Matt Morrison, who was a CCG co-cordinator in 2014, said that “It takes five years to build up good soil, and if you have to move every five years that means you never have good soil. That’s the overarching most challenging thing.” The constant fear of relocation worried members of the CCG that meaningful, long term food production would not take place, hampering the garden’s ability to support UVic students with accessible growing spaces and food security.
Today, the garden remains on the same land — at 2100 McKenzie Avenue, across from CARSA and Centennial Stadium — and has been governed by a series of recurring five-year leases from UVic Campus Planning and Sustainability to the CCG. The current lease is set to expire in 2027.
In 2021, students in a 400-level environmental studies course advocated for the restoration of green spaces on the roof of the David Turpin building, suggesting that they be converted into growing spaces for students.
‘Green roofs’ were included in the original design for the David Turpin building, though they had fallen into disuse, and weeds had overtaken the space. At the time, the Martlet reported on a survey — conducted by several of the students in the class — indicating a great deal of student interest in the roof being turned into a dedicated space for growing food, which could be shared with the UVSS Food Bank and served on campus.
In 2023, another student group by the name of ‘Overgrow UVic’ brought conversations about native plant biodiversity forward by engaging in another act of guerrilla gardening –– planting a small plot of wild strawberries, a Garry Oak tree, and various other native species in front of the McPherson library.
They chose these plants in an attempt to emulate the type of biodiversity that would have been seen in a pre-colonial environment. Overgrow UVic directly referenced the 2010 protests as inspiration for their actions in 2023.
This time, UVic allowed the garden to remain in the quad for two days, before they dug it up and replaced with Kentucky Bluegrass — the non-native monoculture which makes up the remainder of the quad.
The legacy of the Food Not Lawns protest shows there is continuity to these kinds of conversations, demonstrating how people in Victoria care about building healthy and sustainable communities. It also shows that some people don’t want to wait around for institutions to do it for them — they would rather pick up their gardening tools and do it themselves.
Usable outdoor spaces have become a hot commodity in a modern era, where the prospect of owning land has become less and less likely for the younger generations of Canadians. The median price for a single-family home in Victoria sits just shy of $1.2 million. As the fifth most expensive rental market in the country — sitting behind Vancouver, Toronto, Mississauga, and Burlington — putting down roots here is a difficult task.
Reflecting on how guerrilla gardening has become popular within Victoria, Rudolph said that they believe that the quality of UVic’s environmental studies program, coupled with the visibility of native plant environments, has made Victoria a magnet for young activists focused on food security and native plant health.
Though they are no longer an active guerrilla gardener today, environmental activism remains an important part of their life.
“I’m lucky where I live that I have access to land where I can grow a lot of food … My activism has changed a little bit…. [my community hosts] a lot of Indigenous Land Defenders here…. I’ve worked with kids for a long time doing nature education and that feels like a broader stretch of activism — enabling kids to have a connection to the natural world.”
Rudolph also works with queer youth in theatre productions, which they view as another form of activism shared through performance.
Even if subsequent protests and instances of guerrilla gardening haven’t made the same amount of noise, it’s clear that the Food Not Lawns protests in 2010 have had an enduring impact — the tradition for environmental action they helped foster remains. Collective memories of these events continue to influence local activism today. That’s not likely to end anytime soon.
“It is an accessible sort of activism, because you can do it anywhere. You don’t need your own plot of land, you can just find spaces in Victoria, and there are a lot of great spaces in Victoria to do that,” Rudolph said.
“Go plant some seeds, or throw up some native shrubs or bushes, and just kind of see what happens.”
