It’s midnight. Alan Titchmarsh wears a black balaclava, grits a penlight torch between his teeth. In his hands: a succession of jet-black spades and trowels. “Charlie,” he whispers, “Hand me those begonias…”

We’ve all heard of fly-by-night landscapers, but Toronto now has its own cat-gardening team, illegal night-time raiders of the lost hedgerow.

For the city’s so-called ‘guerilla gardeners’ are fighting a war - a war to make public spaces a little greener.

Every two weeks during the summer, this group of horticultural hoodlums stakes out a particularly desolate part of Toronto.

Then they get together with their trowels, shovels and shrubs and build makeshift gardens on city land, often under the cover of night.

First-time planter Dan Quinn explains that the appeal of guerrilla gardening isn't just that it brings green spaces to a notoriously barren city.

"It’s immediate. If you want to do something the right way, the city sanctioned way, it takes two years to do it," Quinn says. "You have to get permission and go through consultation, and you just want to plant flowers. So guerrilla gardening makes complete sense to me."

As Quinn and his fellow guerrillas gather, what's immediately apparent is that almost none of them have much experience. But that's all right. Even Corinne Alstrom, one of the group's coordinators, says she was never really into gardening until she went guerrilla.

There's a ‘walk on the wild side’ aspect to guerrilla gardening that Alstrom says draws people in more than the actual planting.

As fellow co-ordinator Terry Aldebert says: "You're doing something that's a little bit bad ... it's danger thing."

Truly, you haven’t lived until you’ve pruned a rosebush with the threat of a night in the cells.

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