Even buying the worst house on the best street is beyond reach for most of us these days. But just like homes, streets can be do-ups too—all it takes is a little time and a lot of creative thinking. From fruit trees to guerilla gardening, here are 21 ways to pimp your street.
From planting a simple fruit tree to guerrilla gardening, here are 21 ways to spruce up your street.
Living in a good-looking street adds value to your home, but that’s not all. It can build community connections, make you feel safer at night, even increase the likelihood that you’ll go for a jog around the block. But lovely locations don’t always start that way, and a little bit of thought can take your suburb from humdrum to hotspot.
1. Plant fruit trees
Imagine if the most convenient place to find a snack wasn’t the dairy at the top of the road, but the fruit trees lining your street. Councils are beginning to trial planting roadside fruit trees in some parts of New Zealand, but if you want to take matters into your own hands, here’s how:
- Do your homework. Councils have rules about planting on berms and verges, so check your council’s website. Generally, a tree is considered a safety hazard if it’s near an intersection, bus stop, school or pedestrian crossing.
- Select your tree. Go for easy-care varieties that aren’t prone to disease, such as plum, apple, feijoa, mandarin and grapefruit. Talk to your local garden centre about self-fertilising varieties that suit your area. If planting more than one tree, choose some that fruit at different times of the year.
- Surround the tree with companion herbs and flowers to give it the best conditions for fruiting. Mulch around it in a large circle (approximately 1m in diameter), to keep moisture in and mowers away!
- Maintain the tree. Prune to allow the footpath plenty of clearance (about 2.5m) and keep the ground clear of windfalls. If you move, ask subsequent residents to take over maintenance.
- Spread the spoils. Tell your neighbours to help themselves to fruit—and suggest they add their own tree to your neighbourhood orchard. Your road could eventually keep its residents in fresh, seasonal fruit—for free!
2. Find your community garden
Tucked down no-exit streets, in empty suburban sections, church grounds and public reserves all over New Zealand are hundreds of community gardens, and they’re growing faster than zucchinis turn into marrows.
You don’t need green fingers to join in, says Finn Mackesy, community garden coordinator and co-chair of Permaculture in NZ. “There’s been a huge rise in interest in gardening,” he says. “But if you’re going to garden at home, you need to know how to garden. In a community garden, no prior experience is required.” Most groups offer workshops and hands-on help from older, more experienced gardeners, and Finn reckons as many as two-thirds of those who join in are beginners.
Tucked down no-exit streets, in empty suburban sections, church grounds and public reserves all over New Zealand are hundreds of community gardens, and they’re growing faster than zucchinis turn into marrows
There’s a little saying community gardeners are fond of repeating: Flowers grow in flower gardens, vegetables grow in vegetable gardens, and people grow in community gardens. Groan if you like, but it’s a message health care providers, churches and temples around New Zealand have taken to heart. A pilot scheme run by Counties Manukau DHB’s Let’s Beat Diabetes programme has helped set up eight community gardens since late 2008, with 11 more kicking off over the next six months.
As well as helping people, community gardens improve communities. “If people relate to the place they live as the source of their food, they’re going to behave differently,” says Finn.
There’s probably a community garden near you—check our growing list at good. net.nz/comgardens.
3. Go wild with flowers
The wildflowers that bloom along state highways around the country aren’t the work of truck-driving guerrilla gardeners; they were planted by Transit New Zealand to save mowing costs and provide a calming environment for drivers. But why should motorists get all the love?
Empty sections, the land alongside rail tracks, even your own front garden are prime targets for some wildflower power. (Best not introduce wildflowers to areas close to wetlands, river beds, coasts, native bush or conservation areas—they can quickly spread and, besides, why gild a lily?)
Go for straggly looking spots that could use some colour, and stick to the same wildflowers Transit uses: English marigold; cornflower; cosmos; African daisy; blanket flower; baby’s breath; blackeyed Susan; clasping coneflower; catchfly; farewell to spring; coreopsis.
4. Bird call
Attract native birds to your ’hood by giving them places to nest, rest and eat. Go for trees and plants that produce seeds, berries or nectar, and plant a mixture of species for a variety of food sources throughout the year. A hedge will provide places for nesting and harbour delicious insects. You don’t need to plant a whole forest; the idea is to create a network of plants, or ‘wildlife corridors’ that birds can travel along.
5. Pull some weeds
It’s pretty much everyone’s most-hated job, but doing a spot of weeding is one of the best things you can do for your suburb, ecologically speaking. Invasive weeds are a nasty threat to national biosecurity, so removing them from public land earns you around one million eco-warrior bonus points. Order a free guide to recognising and controlling weeds from Weedbusters (weedbusters.co.nz).
6. Tagger b’gone
To most of us, spraying an illegible signature on random walls and fences seems pointless at best. But the best way to demonstrate the futility of the pastime to taggers is to tag them back—using a lovely opaque coating of plain paint before anyone else gets to see their jagged little signatures.
Resene’s PaintWise scheme supplies 100 percent recycled paint free to community groups for covering graffiti and for projects. Grey is always available; other colours can be requested, but availability depends on the paints returned for recycling. Many councils offer a free graffiti removal service or DIY kits.
7. Bomb ’em back
When a wall is particularly popular with taggers, painting over their nightly namedropping is a Sisyphean task. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: designate the wall a ‘graffiti art’ area, and challenge the more talented street artists—or some local school kids—to create a mural so fine no tagger dare touch it.
You could even commission the art yourself, as Sera Mitchinson and Stephen Wilson did for the plain concrete wall outside their Kingsland design studio and shop, Selector. “We didn’t want our customers to have to look at boring,” says Sera. “We asked a few of our graffiti art mates to paint it for us, around the theme of native New Zealand, and they went for it. Our landlord loved it so much, he asked them to do the whole thing. We now have a sea view and a native bush scene, which even in dismal weather keeps me inspired!”
It’s not only Sera and her customers who enjoy the view: Auckland City Council was so impressed by an early version of the wall art, it commissioned the artists to paint a full concrete wall below Kingsland railway station. It has never been tagged.
8. Go guerrilla
The first rule of guerrilla gardening is: do not wait for permission to garden. The second rule of guerrilla gardening is: public space belongs to the people.
Guerrilla gardeners secretly cultivate land they do not own. Operating on the margins of the law, they are bound by an unwritten code of honour: beautify the ugly; nurture neglected space; create abundance from waste.
These undercover growers are a mischievous bunch, and in New Zealand they tend to work alone (although some kindred spirits gather at good.net.nz/2/ggnz). Highway rest stops, median strips, parks, derelict spaces and untended public planters are all fair game.
“There’s so much open space,” says sometime guerrilla gardener Finn Mackesy. “There’s a lot of council land that could be used really effectively without taking away from what it’s designed for; there’s a lot of edge space and extra room.” Although Finn firmly believes that fruit and nut trees improve public places, guerrilla gardening “doesn’t have to be food. Food’s an obvious return, but there’s value in making something beautiful.”
“If someone puts a lot of time and energy into making something beautiful, functional or productive then there’s a ripple effect. Other people go either ‘Wow, I could do that,’ or ‘Wow, isn’t that nice?’”
Here are five tips from top guerrillas:
- Shock and awe: bright, colourful plants attract attention and affection, so are less likely to be removed. Sunflowers are a guerrilla favourite.
- Use well-established seedlings and mature flowering plants to ensure your efforts aren’t weeded out.
- Lovely smells are always appreciated: try hardy lavender and sage.
- If you plant your own berm and look after it well, council (probably) won’t touch it.
- Avoid planting on roundabouts or around supermarkets; people are usually contracted to maintain these areas and your efforts are more likely to be removed.
9. Get permission —and money
There’s one big advantage to seeking project approval through official channels. City councils are major contributors to community organisations and projects, and discretionary funding and grants are often available for projects such as tree planting, weed removal and anti-graffiti murals. Look on your council’s website to see what funds are available and how to apply.
10. Wear the t-shirt
Wearing your suburb on your chest is a great way to show neighbourhood pride— but take a lesson in how not to do it from the altogether lovely, if a little rundown, suburb of Newtown in Wellington. Local business owners were incensed when a Newtown designer issued a t-shirt depicting a council flat in their ’hood. “Newtown,” the tongue-in-cheek slogan proclaimed. “It’s a bit shit.” A retaliatory t-shirt was soon launched, bearing the much lamer legend: “Why travel the world when you can visit Newtown?”
11. Make your postie smile
Decorate your letterbox with a bright coat of paint, mural, mosaic, flowers—real or fake—or even give it a green roof: click here for DIY instructions.
12. Storm the beaches
If you’re lucky enough to live near a beach, you’re probably already concerned about keeping it clean—hopefully concerned enough to pick up litter when you see it. But if the beach needs more TLC than you can supply, Project Jonah makes it easy to organise your own beach clean-up. Download the Project Jonah Cleanup Kit at good.net.nz/2/jonah.
13. You’re my seed bomb
It’s the quickest, easiest way to plant seeds: wad them up with compost and soil, and throw them at the land you want to plant. Popular with guerrilla gardeners, children, the elderly and the lazy, seed bombs are a great way to grow wildflowers and native plants on land you can’t dig up or that’s difficult to access.
The process is similar to making chocolate truffles, says permaculture tutor Adam Guyton. Mix one-part seeds with three-parts compost until the seeds are coated. Add five-parts dry, crumbled clay soil and a little water, until the mixture is like dough. Roll into balls the size of marbles and dry them in a shady place. Throw, roll or drop them onto your chosen site (bare soil is the most suitable) and they’ll absorb moisture from the atmosphere and sprout when the conditions are right, creating the ultimate no-effort garden.
14. Get knitty with it
Colourful yarn hearts decorate the wire fence of an empty section in central Wellington. Crocheted flowers climb lamp posts overnight in Cathedral Square. Woollen warmers proclaiming ‘Smile’ and ‘Love’ encircle the branches of a Devonport tree. Armed with crochet hooks and knitting needles, guerrilla knitters are softening urban landscapes all over New Zealand.
A recent global phenomenon, the brightly coloured, hand-knitted ‘tags’ first appeared in Texas, where ‘yarn bombing’ crew Knitta Please formed in 2005 (members include Knotorious N.I.T. and Loop Dogg). Irreverent knitters from Stockholm to Sydney were quick to take up the inoffensive form of graffiti.
Lucy Arnold, founder of craft market Felt (felt.co.nz), prefers to call it “urban embellishment”. She’s responsible for the undercover installation of crocheted vines and flowers in Cathedral Square, commissioned for the Christchurch Arts Festival in July. Fifty local crocheters aged 20 to 70, including some absolute beginners, created over 1,000 removable flowers in two months. It raised a lot of smiles in the garden city—and the crocheters had a blast too. “The actual installation was only one part of the project,” says Lucy. “The rest was the community that grew up around it. We met twice a week, hung out and had a bit of a yarn—no pun intended.”
15. Butt out
You may have exhaled a minty-fresh sigh of relief when cigarettes were banned from indoor places in 2004, but when the smokers were sent outside their butts went with them. Cigarette butts can take ten years to break down in seawater—and when birds and fish eat them, all those toxic chemicals enter the food chain. If there are cigarette butts littering your landscape, point your local community board or council in the direction of Keep New Zealand Beautiful’s ‘No butts about it’ toolkit. When the campaign was implemented in Newmarket, Auckland, 100,000 butts were collected in the first nine weeks.
16. Start a petition
So you want a grass berm alongside your footpath, or planter boxes by the shops, or speed bumps on your street, or a bus stop upgrade … starting a petition is as easy as writing up what you want in a crystal clear sentence or two, then taking it ’round your neighbours and dropping copies at your local dairy, library, church or community centre. Take it to your next community board meeting (see #19) or send it to your council with a letter outlining your request. The more support you have, the more likely they are to take your request seriously.
17. Set up a Men’s Shed
‘Men’s Sheds’ bring together experienced handymen and guys who could learn a few things, in community workshops set up and run by the men themselves. The concept was introduced in Australia, where more than 200 sheds have been established since 2002; several sheds are now being developed in New Zealand.
Our staunch Antipodean blokes find it tough to ask for support after partner loss, retirement or redundancy, with older men in particular suffering isolation, loneliness and depression. Men’s Sheds provide a place for men to connect with each other, learn and teach valuable skills, pool resources, make cool stuff, and provide practical know-how for community projects.
18. Adopt a stream
Project Twin Streams started as a progressive council’s solution to a big problem: storm water overflow and flooding in Waitakere. Local streams needed to be restored, but were overgrown with weeds and had become dumping grounds for rubbish—if they were there at all. Subdivisions and new roading had diverted the streams into underground pipes at so many points that many residents didn’t even know there had been streams flowing through their backyards.
“Initially, it might’ve been quicker and cheaper to contract the work out,” says Project Twin Streams community coordinator Teremoana Jones, “but the community involvement has meant the solution is ongoing, with people in the area now looking after the streams. Otherwise, the problems would just happen again.”
Since 2003, the project has cleared many kilometres of streambank weeds, planted almost half-a-million trees—enough to absorb the annual emissions from 15,000 cars—and built nine kilometres of cycle and walking paths. Creative engagement has been another big part of the project, which has spawned its own art award, song quest, two books, a photography exhibition and countless murals, sculptures, mosaics and friendships between neighbours.
“Whoever thought a storm water mitigation project would end up promoting community arts and education?” asks Teremoana. Her cheeky grin suggests she had something to do with it.
19. Sounding board
Most Kiwi communities have a community board. They’re there to advocate for residents, take local concerns to the city council, and encourage vibrant, safe and healthy communities. They’re your first port of call when you want help with a community project or problem, and they have a small budget to assist community groups, initiatives and events. Here’s how to get in front of yours:
- Find out which community board serves your area (see good.net.nz/2/comboards), and when and where it meets.
- Turn up to the next meeting. The secretary will give you a form to fill in, and you’ll be given five minutes to speak in the ‘public forum’ part of the meeting.
- When you are called, tell the board what the problem is, and your proposed solution.
- Your request will likely be assigned to an officer, who will consult those it affects then report back to the board.
- Go to the next meeting or contact the chair of the board to check on progress.
20. Take back the streets
Too many of us are afraid to walk around our neighbourhood streets at night—often for no other reason than that they’re empty. The best way to make our streets safer is to use them more. Find out about children’s walking school buses, adult walking or harrier clubs or simply head out for a regular after-dinner stroll.
If you’re concerned about violence or crime in your area and fancy yourself as a brave defender of justice, you could join a local Community Patrol (communitypatrols.org.nz); the less brave may prefer their local Neighbourhood Watch or Neighbourhood Support Group.
21. Relax! Join a group
We’re not suggesting you become a one-person beach-cleaning, tree-planting, guerrilla-gardening superhero—frankly, we got a little tired just thinking about all the things we could do to spruce up our streets. If you’re the caped crusader type, there’s nothing wrong with pimping and primping your ’hood anonymously. But join forces with like-minded souls, and you’ll see your efforts multiplied—and you might just end up feeling part of a community.
