Richard Reynolds himself.

If you think that being 'green' is as exciting as separating your waste and switching to energy-saving light-bulbs, you're missing out. The rise of popular environmentalism has gone and spun itself a new cloak of cool in the form of late-night (pseudo-illegal) gardening. Planting pleasant little patches of flora and fauna has suddenly become an edgy, punkish thing to do. If you do it in the atmospheric dead of night, that is, under the rebellious guise of 'guerilla gardening.'

Neglected little bits of urban sprawl lie here and there all over the world's major cities, but there are determined bands of re-development renegades who meet up at night, armed with trowels and bags of plants, who take to un-loved scratches of land with vigour, transforming them into more aesthetically pleasing and eco-friendly oases. The idea of guerrilla gardening has grown in popularity considerably over the last year or so, but it's certainly nothing new. Try out this hundred-years-old example from Wikipedia.

But books like On Guerilla Gardening by Richard Reynolds have captured people's imaginations of late and hundreds of guerrilla gardens have sprung up intermittently all over the country in a satisfyingly practical development within the green movement.

I spoke to Reynolds, who has been especially vocal about the concept, and he said that while guerrilla gardening seemed to be a "loose but global" trend, he felt that he had the ability to get more people involved in it:

"My role is on the one hand as a guerrilla gardener in my local area, Elephant & Castle [in London]. I've got six gardens I tend to there - one has recently been given legal status. But on the other hand I run a website about guerrilla gardening, publicise it as much as I can, and I speak on the subject quite often."

Derek Tan, a guerrilla gardener I spoke to says he remembers meeting Reynolds at a midnight planting session at Bethnal Green: "Richard had just come from a gardening expo where he knew one of the organisers. He had all these plants with him that he needed to get rid of, so we got to work. It was a lot of fun. I'm a bit of a socialist at heart and it felt like a good thing to do - the idea of a kind of underground, alternative nightlife with a positive effect really appealed to me."

Reynolds, whose website (http://www.guerillagardening.org/) receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, says that even he was taken aback at the growth of the movement in the past year, but adds that he doesn't want to be seen as the sole leader of guerrilla gardeners around the world.

"In my book I make it quite clear that I'm not writing a manifesto - there are different reasons for why people do guerrilla gardening. In fact, I've never press-released about [it], but there are some people who are using a political platform to speak about it."

He points me in the direction of Councillor Christopher Wellbelove, Mayor of Lambeth, who writes about local gardening projects on his blog. The political awareness of guerrilla gardening, then, is burgeoning in some small degree at least. Councillor Wellbelove commented, "It is important for these projects to be lead by the wishes of the local community with the help from the local authority."

That's all well and good, but for me the really engaging aspect of the movement is that night-time shiftiness with which the anonymous guerrilla gardeners go about their business; that skirting on the edges of the law with green intentions in tow. The romanticised image of guerrilla gardening is captured by the tale of the Lewes Road Community Garden in Brighton - a plot of public greenery which stands where a derelict petrol station had lain in dilapidation for years. Reynolds suggested I take a look at it after visiting it himself a few weeks ago:

"They managed to actually break in somewhere and create a garden. I was really impressed by the audacity and scale of it. Using guerrilla gardening as a strategy they have achieved a community garden which will last a long time."

Duncan Blinkhorn was the guy who started it all. He remembers his initial frustration with the disused petrol station:

"It was becoming increasingly irritating to me and seemed like a slap in the face to local people who already had to put up with grey decrepid buildings and a busy polluted main road under their noses.

"In April, my partner and I got hold of some very chalky topsoil through Freecycle and one Saturday, lugged it over the fence and dug it into one of a dozen huge upturned concrete sewage pipes on the site. We chalked 'plant it' and 'paint it' on the sides, so passers by would get the idea that something was happening. Someone else had penned 'Imagine A Garden' on the estate agent's 'enquiries' board."

Once the ball got rolling, it was hard to stop. Blinkhorn says that every passer by they asked about what they were doing (well before it was all officially legitimate) said they thought it was a great idea, so they kept doing it. Then came a surprise:

"A week or so after the opening, a chunky additional lock and chain appeared on the gate with warning signs from a security company. We feared we were being shut out by the owners and launched a petition to demonstrate the level of popular support. Within ten days, 3,000 people had signed up calling for the garden to be kept open. The local paper, The Argus, carried supportive articles, letters and editorial comment. Local councillors expressed their support and there were hundreds of supportive comments on our web-site. We were in no doubt that this project had overwhelming and passionate support from nearly everyone who had come in or past it or had just heard about it."

Not long after that, the owners were persuaded to hand over the keys and the rest is (very recent) history. And they've just come to the end of a summer of community garden events - from barbecues to film screenings, picnics and gardening groups.

It's worth checking out guerrilla gardening for yourself. The Glasgow group has a strong web-presence, and there's lots happening in cities like London and Bristol as well. But even simply grabbing a copy of Reynolds' book and heading out some starry night with your mates and some handsome begonia's is probably the easiest way of going about it. Dig in.