These guerrilla gardeners are secretly grafting fruit bearing branches trees onto ornamental city trees...

A group of guerrilla gardeners in San Francisco have been secretly (and illegally) splicing branches from fruit bearing trees onto the city's ornamental trees so that instead of growing only flowers, they will also grow fruit.

I just love guerrilla gardeners. The very fact that fruit trees weren't planted in the first place, just goes to show exactly what the city councils think of their city, its population and of trees. How narrow and limited is their vision of what a city could be - what the world could be - if trees were planted everywhere. Just imagine walking around your city's streets and having trees laden with fruit lining the sidewalk - free for anyone to pick.

In some countries it's like that. I remember being in Greece and being amazed at the town squares of almost every town I passed through being lined with orange trees, bursting with oranges, tangerines, lemons, free for anyone to pick. I couldn't quite believe it at first. I had to ask someone, 'who do these trees belong to?' and 'what - you mean anyone can just pick the fruit - for free?' It was almost an alien concept to me.

In most countries it's not like that. City Councillors say that fruit trees are messy, which is why they plant ornamental trees instead, if they even plant trees at all. I don't believe that at all. It seems to me more likely that if everybody had free access to the bounty of nature - not pre-packaged, plastic wrapped, bar-coded and stacked in some refrigerated supermarket - but fresh, straight from the tree... well, who knows what would happen?

Guerrilla gardeners are great! Grafting trees is fairly specialized - you need to know how to do it properly if you want it to be successful. Here is a short video with tips on grafting fruit trees:

And here is the interested story of a man who created a tree which bears 40 different kinds of fruit.

If grafting fruit trees onto your town's ornamental trees is too complicated for you, there are plenty of other guerrilla gardening practices that you could do - from planting an organic garden on a piece of disused wasteland to simply scattering seeds or 'seedbombs' of herbs and wildflowers on neglected patches of ground.

A city doesn't have to be a grey, concrete wasteland. It can be as green as any ancient forest and as abundant as the Garden of Eden.

I strongly believe that almost all of the environmental problems we face could be quite simply solved if we just plant trees everywhere. I am creating a tag for this post called 'planttreeseverywhere' . If other people have stories, ideas or visions to share, regarding positive change involving new ways of growing food, making our cities green, or other hi-tech or lo-tech solutions to improving quality of life in a sustainable way - please make a post and use that tag. I'd be very interested to hear about other good things like this.

You may also wish to check out the 'ecotrain' tag here. It's a brand new steemit collaboration project involving many of the best writers covering a wide variety of topics, from all sorts of unexpected angles. You're bound to find something worth reading there.

Finally - here is the inspirational 'gangsta gardener' Ron Finley, talking about his work, growing food on the streets of south central LA. This is well worth ten minutes of your time to watch - seriously.

'Gardening is the most therapeutic, and defiant act you can do - especially in the inner city. Plus, you get strawberries.'