Urban Guerrilla

It started with conkers. Ever since the invention of string, it seems, people like Lunchista fils have collected conkers every autumn, threaded them on string, striven to make them as indestructible as posible (by means fair or foul) and smashed them into each other.

Academics have recently pieced together the story of the invention of string, or at least, why it caught on so rapidly. As the ice-age tightened its grip on our ancestral landscape, the cave-family who were able to use a sharp bone and some string to piece together their furs to a more figure-hugging shape, including new-fangled luxuries such as shoes, obviously had a life-enhancing piece of technology worth sharing. It's interesting to speculate that the existance of patents in those early days would probably have done for the human race.

Meanwhile, as the more serious-minded family members stitched together their winter survival kit, some bored five-year-old was probably experimenting with the head-bashing potential of one of granny's pieces of this new-fangled string stuff with a nut threaded on the end...on his little sister's head. The family's continued survival thus rested on the invention of the game of conkers as a substitute activity. But I digress.

What usually happened at Chateau Lunchista was that the conkers would be collected all right, but then just thrown round the garden and forgotten about...until nature took its course and small horse-chestnut trees started appearing everywhere. Lunchista dug them up and put them into pots. They were later joined by some stray Hazels, grown from nuts that had gone past their "use-by".

Then a suitable road-verge appeared: people kept veering off it in their trucks and demolishing, over and over again, the same piece of wall. We thought a hedge might be a better bet, keeping the HGVs off the wall, while also providing a softer landing. So the trees got planted out in front of the wall. That gave Lunchista a taste for that kind of thing.

Hazels and rose-hips (the big fat irregularly-shaped type) spilled out onto the path from the station to my previous workplace. They all came home, got planted, and are now growing in our garden. The lawn under an oak tree at Castle Howard was covered in acorns when we visited one day last autumn. Erm, then it wasn't: some of them are in the loo-rolls in the picture, and some took off last year. Planting them out is the difficult bit. It hasn't stopped me from collecting more seeds of various sorts, though.

It took ages before I could find a place that isn't mowed, dug over or napalmed with weed-killer on a regular basis. I had to content myself with lobbing apple-cores and plum-stones (dozens and dozens of them, from fruit from the orchard) out of the car window if our trips took us along country lanes.

Until the day, just over a month ago, when I spotted a perfectly good gap in a hedge. It was just the right time of year too.

So I loaded a potted oak sapling into a JJB bag (and covered it with another bag), stuck in a trowel and set off, in the middle of the afternoon when everybody's at work. Getting from the path to the chosen place was a pain: it was full of nettles! I also noticed how loud a carrier-bag can be, and how long it can (seem to) take to get a plant out of a pot. I'd picked a place that looked as though it had a nice view: that way, if people happened to come by I could pretend to be looking at something. This came in handy when 2 joggers hove into sight.

I quickly dug a hole, stuffed the contents of the plant-pot in, pushed a load of dead weed stems over the patch of bare soil, trod it down a bit, picked up my stuff and scarpered. It poured with rain that night, so hopefully the tree got a good start. It's also bang up against a wire fence, so no strimmers or accidental boots.

A month on and not only has the neighbouring path been completely mown (missing my tree) but floods have come, and washed a load of old twigs over it. It looks as if I'd picked a good place: the tree's neither been strimmed down nor washed away.

Nearby is a huge old apple tree that probably escaped from somebody's orchard. It dropped hundreds, possibly thousands, of little apples. Not much good for eating, but brilliant as "seed bombs". They are now scattered in the brambles all along the path, among the nettles along the edge of a nearby field, and in the long grass the strimmers have missed under a fence along the main road South out of the city. Of course apple seeds don't usually "grow true" but even so, they'll still produce fruit of some kind, or at the very least grow into trees and improve the landscape.

On my way back, I also got rid of two stuffed pockets full of beech nuts. They are lining a verge between the road and a field, currently under water, where 700 houses are to be built. It turns out that Lunchista is in good company: Admiral Collingwood (Nelson's second-in-command at Trafalgar, no less), thinking about the need for timber in the future, used to plant acorns wherever he could.

Barking? Possibly. But who would you rather put in charge of your future: Admiral Collingwood, or someone who'd arrange to build 700 houses on a flood plain?