Seed Bomb

Seed Bomb is a guerrilla gardening intervention in Harlem. The project is grounded in a simple, subversive proposition: hand-rolled seed bombs — balls of compost, clay, and native wildflower seeds — thrown into neglected patches of public land to trigger unauthorized bloom. A salt shaker filled with wildflower seeds seasons the city sidewalk, curbside, median. It is an act of ecological disobedience, a challenge to the institutional ownership of public space, and an assertion that the city's interstitial edges belong to everyone.

Public parks and street plantings are largely authored by municipal agencies — their species lists prescribed, their aesthetics managed, their succession arrested. Seed Bomb operates outside that system. By seeding spontaneously, without permission, without maintenance guarantees, the project invites a different ecological imagination: one where wildness, accident, and community care co-author the landscape alongside the state.

The project is part of a broader vision for a corridor of art, culture, and ecology along Harlem’s public spaces. Read the op-ed in the New York Amsterdam News.