Guerrilla Gardening: At the Intersection of Birnam Wood and Minneapolis

To reflect on guerrilla gardening and the narratives sprouting from it, I intersect a literary work–the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, published in 2023, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth—with descriptions of gardens at sites of police killings in the greater Minneapolis metro area. I argue that guerrilla garden infrastructures sprout in the soil of highly unequal power, often in the wake of the fatal exercise of state power, and usually in the shadow of a foreshortened environmental future. They are DIY infrastructures, constructed by people weathering the breakdowns inherent to entwined environmental, political, and economic crises in the 21^st century.