Meet 'Plantsy' - the guerilla gardener who has spent 15 years single-handedly sprucing up his drab local area.<br /><br />Matthew Bradby, 51, has made it his mission to bring some colour to Tottenham, north London.<br /><br />Over 15 years Matthew reckons he has spent hundreds planting several hundred bulbs and plants like daffodils, crocuses and crab apple trees in 20 different spots across 120 miles.<br /><br />He regularly heads out armed with his trusty trowel to plant on barren grassy areas and road verges.<br /><br />Oxford-educated Matthew, a charity communications worker, says his biggest enemies are local councils.<br /><br />Mean-spirited workers regularly mow over his landscaping efforts despite the life they bring to unloved areas, he claims<br /><br />But Matthew always meets these setbacks with a fresh horticultural counter-offensive - planting more bulbs and seeds.<br /><br />And he is now plotting to plant an entire hedge in front of an “ugly” iron railing by a nearby A-road.<br /><br />Matthew said: “Guerrilla gardening is deciding to do gardening on property that strictly speaking doesn’t belong to you and would typically be public property or common land.<br /><br />“I think it could also be private land if the private land wasn’t being maintained.<br /><br />“Bulbs like daffodils and crocuses are one of the best ways of doing it because you can go out with a trowel in autumn and stick those bulbs in all sorts of places and nobody knows they’re there until they come up in March or April.<br /><br />“They’re very resilient so people can trample on them and because they’re a bulb they retreat underground and then the next spring they come up again.<br /><br />“Some of them I’ve planted have lasted for 10 or 15 years despite being mowed and all sorts and they carry on coming up.<br /><br />“Whenever I walk past them it always makes me smile.<br /><br />“Literally all you need is a trowel and that’s it. I wouldn’t mind spending £10 or £20 on bulbs, who knows I might spend £50 on bits and bobs depending on what I saw in a garden centre.<br /><br />“Things like fruit trees are nice to plant as well.<br /><br />“There are a couple of crab apple trees that I have planted in public verges where there had been trees before but they died so I put others in.<br /><br />“If you can stop the local authority from mowing them then they can do really well and people really appreciate them, even local councillors.<br /><br />“Sometimes other people say to me ‘I’m going to do this, that and the other’ and I have to tell them contractors are going to come with mowers and mow everything.<br /><br />“The biggest risk for guerrilla gardening isn’t so much the vandals – it’s the local authorities and landscape contractors because they just come and mow things over.<br /><br />“In the last few years there has been a little patch of land not far from where I am and it has this great big galvanised iron railing running down it and it’s just ugly.<br /><br />“There’s an A-road on one side and flats on the other. The local authority planted a couple of trees that the residents’ group paid for but I was thinking a really good idea would be to plant a hedge down that railing.
