Salon.com > Lenora Todaro

Power to the flower

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:34:00 +0000

Four years ago Richard Reynolds had his virgin guerrilla gardening experience. Fed up with the litter and tangled shrubs that filled the public planters in his south London neighborhood of Elephant and Castle, he set out at 2 a.m. wired on tea and began weeding and planting. "I felt like some kind of mischievous tooth-fairy or green-fingered vandal," he writes in his new book, "On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries." He began blogging about his experience and has, in a fairly short time, built a global network for guerrilla gardeners to plan late-night digs that stretches from London to Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India, to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Katrina, 9/11 and disaster capitalism

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:44:00 +0000

Naomi Klein is one of North America's most lucid translators of globalization and its defects. Her book "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (2000) landed just after demonstrators in Seattle put demands for international economic justice on the front page. In "No Logo," Klein critiqued multinational corporations for creating poor labor conditions in the developing world, all to further "the brand."

Hives among us

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 12:01:00 +0000

"Beekeeping is a completely sensuous experience," says Roger Repohl, a beekeeper at the Genesis Community Garden behind St. Augustine's Catholic Church in the South Bronx, in New York. "You touch and taste the honey, listen to the bees hum, smell the smoke." Clad in his "vestments" -- a white beekeeper suit, veiled hat, thick canvas gloves -- he squeezes a "smoker," a bellows attached to a can that he's filled with pine needles and lighted with a match. The smoke warns the bees that the keeper is approaching to inspect the hive, but the aroma evokes Christmas. "I use pine needles," he says, "because they smell good and you might as well be an aesthete about the experience."

Repohl's hives are not the natural conical ones that inspired 1960s hairstyles, but square wood boxes stacked five high, like file cabinets, or dresser drawers. He harvests about 300 pounds of honey a year at this peaceful outpost in the middle of auto repair shops, hardware stores and a mom-and-pop slaughterhouse.