Meet the guerilla gardener who’s spent 15 years sprucing up Tottenham

A gardener who has been single-handedly sprucing up his London neighbourhood for more than a decade has been dubbed ‘Plantsy’.

51-year-old Matthew Bradby has made it his mission to brighten up his home of Tottenham, north London, spending hundreds planting flowers and trees in an area spanning 120 miles.

And while his biggest enemy is local councils mowing down his floral creations, he says that won’t stop him and he’ll simply replace them with more plants.

Matthew, a charity communications worker, has been planting daffodils, crocuses and crab apple trees across Tottenham since 2008.

He often heads out with his trusty trowel to plant on barren grassy areas and road verges – and he’s currently planning to plant an entire hedge in front of an ‘ugly’ iron railing near an A road.

Matthew said: ‘Guerrilla gardening is deciding to do gardening on property that strictly speaking doesn’t belong to you and would typically be public property or common land.

‘I think it could also be private land if the private land wasn’t being maintained.

‘Bulbs like daffodils and crocuses are one of the best ways of doing it because you can go out with a trowel in autumn and stick those bulbs in all sorts of places and nobody knows they’re there until they come up in March or April.

Matthew Bradby has been improving his local area for 15 years (Picture: SWNS)

He’s planted a number of trees to replace ones which had died (Picture: SWNS)

‘They’re very resilient so people can trample on them and because they’re a bulb they retreat underground and then the next spring they come up again.

‘Some of them I’ve planted have lasted for 10 or 15 years despite being mowed and all sorts and they carry on coming up.

‘Whenever I walk past them it always makes me smile.

‘Literally all you need is a trowel and that’s it. I wouldn’t mind spending £10 or £20 on bulbs, who knows I might spend £50 on bits and bobs depending on what I saw in a garden centre.

‘Things like fruit trees are nice to plant as well.

‘There are a couple of crab apple trees I have planted in public verges where there had been trees before but they died so I put others in.

‘If you can stop the local authority from mowing them then they can do really well and people really appreciate them, even local councillors.

‘Sometimes other people say to me “I’m going to do this, that and the other” and I have to tell them contractors are going to come with mowers and mow everything.

He likes to plant bulbs as they can take a while to pop up (Picture: SWNS)

He gets positive feedback from locals (Picture: SWNS)

‘The biggest risk for guerrilla gardening isn’t so much the vandals – it’s the local authorities and landscape contractors because they just come and mow things over.

‘In the last few years there has been a little patch of land not far from where I am and it has this great big galvanised iron railing running down it and it’s just ugly.

‘There’s an A-road on one side and flats on the other. The local authority planted a couple of trees that the residents’ group paid for but I was thinking a really good idea would be to plant a hedge down that railing.

‘You can get little hedging trees like hawthorns really cheaply and you just put them in in autumn. That’s a temptation!

‘It wouldn’t cost a lot to put the hedge in and I think it would be quite doable and make a contribution to making the area look nicer.

‘I know you could have a conversation with the local authority about putting a hedge in but it might take you a decade to get through all their approvals.’

His efforts bring life to sad grass verges (Picture: SWNS)

But sometimes his efforts are mown down by local council workers (Picture: SWNS)

Matthew’s interest in guerilla gardening began during his student days at the University of Oxford – but he only started doing it in the last 15 years.

He said: ‘It is something that first occurred to me decades ago when I was a student and walking along roads of terraced houses and seeing little front gardens that would just be concrete or full of rubbish or discarded furniture.

‘It was just street after street after street of this sort of thing, especially on main roads.

‘I just thought to myself “wouldn’t it be good if you could do something either with the people or yourself”.

‘There have been things in the residents’ group when people have said things like “lovely bulbs” and “lovely flowers”.

‘I am confident people notice that kind of thing.

‘It’s about making places nicer to live in and it’s something I wish more people would do.

‘There is so much we could do to turn concrete estates with cracked pavements into nicer areas.’

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‘The biggest risk for guerrilla gardening isn’t so much the vandals – it’s the local authorities and landscape contractors because they just come and mow things over.’