Guerrilla Grafting

Urban trees can be beautiful and a hazard

Apparently up to 80% 0f the population have never used a road map when traveling in the car. Satellite navigation became popular in the nineties and it looks as though there are a lot of younger drivers on the road who started with a clunky screen on their dashboard and have progressed to using their phone to find a destination.

I’m one of those people that ‘progressed’ from the Collins road atlas straight to a phone and as handy as it can be they are not perfect (some say it’s me but I am in denial) Last week I headed down to Enniskillen and set the map to my location before setting off.  The default setting is to take the fastest route and what a route I went. I was taken down onto tiny single track roads more suitable for tractors. If my phone battery went I would probably still be there trying to miss the potholes.  Without the navigation taking me off the beaten tracks I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen as many beautiful autumn tree colours. Farmers along the route have done a wonderful job of planting colourful native and non-native trees along the roads and fields. A real joy to behold.

Guerrilla Grafting

Planting trees doesn’t always get a seal of approval though. Every year in urban areas the councils are usually inundated with complaints about fallen leaves causing a hazard , either by clogging up gutters or being slippery.  In contrast there is a group who thinks that urban trees are a really underused source of food and like guerrilla gardeners who go around planting vegetables in city centre roundabouts and throwing seed bombs, they are heading out and grafting fruit stock onto ornamental tree branches. 

The group of fruit lovers in San Francisco call it “guerrilla grafting” they graft fruit bearing branches onto fruitless, ornamental trees.

In many built up areas, councils make sure that flowering fruit trees don’t bear any fruit, in order to keep fallen fruit from making a mess on pavements and attracting vermin. Most public trees are fruitless, a fact that the Guerrilla Grafters obviously don’t like. While authorities see urban fruit-bearing trees as a nuisance, these agricultural rebels see them as an opportunity to provide fresh, healthy produce for free to anyone who walks by.

Noble Gesture

One member on their facebook page tells us “Guerrilla Grafters is a grassroots group that sees a missed opportunity for cities to provide a peach or a pear to anyone strolling by. Their objective is to restore sterile city trees into fruit-bearers by grafting branches from fertile trees. The project may not resolve food scarcity, but it helps foster a habitat that sustains us.” Their mission, they say is to make delicious, nutritious fruit available to urban residents through these grafts.

It is a noble gesture but guerrilla grafting is illegal and classified as vandalism by San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, but unless someone is caught in the act, there’s not much the police can do.  Apparently it is hard to catch anyone because it’s hard to know what an illegal graft looks like; maybe it’ll be like a fingerprint in future as everyone will develop a particular style.

However, some people seem to think guerrilla grafting is a very serious problem. “It gets very dangerous very quickly,” said Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of Public Works. “I mean the minute that fruit gets crushed on the sidewalk, it is slippery. We certainly don’t want people to get injured.”

The intention of doing guerrilla grafting is, says a member, not so much for the sake of challenging authority, but to set a working example. Plus they promise, every grafted tree has a steward, someone who promises to check up on it regularly, making sure it doesn’t cause any problems. How this will pan out on a legal basis is yet to be decided. Does a ‘steward’ have a legal obligation and what if someone put in a claim against them? 

Many fruit lovers in California do try “legal channels” One member wanted to plant a fruit tree in front of her house and was fully prepared to care for it herself. But her efforts were repeatedly thwarted by the department and by San Francisco non-profit Friends of the Urban Forest. So she began connecting with other frustrated residents who wanted fruit trees and they started using social media to delve into underground channels.

Movement member Tara Hui says “The hope is that through this one small act (of grafting) we can reconnect with a shared space and reconnect with each other.” Ultimately, I think codes and regulations should respond to the reality of people’s lives. Just taking an evening stroll, and then you see a fruit and you reach over and now you’re nourished.” Unless of course you slip up on it covering your clothes with ripe fruit and get stung by wasps. In a lot of towns, pavement slabs are taken up and replaced with asphalt because of insurance claims, so I can’t see many ‘grafters’ around here just yet.