"I stepped out into the world to cultivate land wherever I liked. The mission was to fight the miserable public flowerbeds around my neighbourhood."
The book charts what it says is a "revolutionary history" of a movement which has its roots in 1970s New York and has since inspired urban dwellers across the world to defy authorities and adopt and cherish neglected public spaces.
GG 3516 Greg, in Zurich in Switzerland, tells of Saturday-night sorties to beautify a traffic island in the city, while GG 158 Luc, in Montreal, Canada, documents a "pavement garden" he has been cultivating for four years.
GG 013 Julia, one of the movement's leading lights, posts pictures and descriptions of significant victories in Berlin, where the Rosa Rose garden in the east of the city has grown out of a vacant lot once covered in rubble and rubbish.
GG 1168 David, and GG Michael 1169, graphic designers in Tokyo, say their motivation was a passion for growing food.
According to Reynolds' book, they began in 2005 by "chucking pumpkin seeds into a vacant lot near David's home" in the city, and, encouraged by the pumpkins' progress, continued with a small guerrilla farm on waste ground in the Kamiyacho district.
"It's about living in an edible jungle," David, who now also grows broccoli and radishes land owned by Tokyo city authorities, says in the book. "Vegetables are best fresh, so I thought they should be grown locally."
"A WIN-WIN WAR"
Guerrilla Gardening is a crime in Britain - digging up land you do not own is classed as committing criminal damage - but Reynolds insists it is a victimless one and is clearly unfazed by encounters with police.
"Yes, by law this is criminal damage... but common sense would suggest it is quite the opposite," he said.
He described a recent night-time dig on a large roundabout in central London where dozens of police pulled up, and ordered him and fellow gardeners to down tools or face arrest.
"We reluctantly withdrew," he said, adding with a smile that they returned to finish the job an hour later when the coast was clear.
Reynolds has now largely given up his more mainstream work in advertising and devotes his time to writing about Guerrilla Gardening, maintaining his website and spreading the word.
And while he characterizes the activity as a battle and uses the language of war, he insists there are no losers.
"This a win-win war," he writes. "Take a public place of wasted opportunity and turn it into a garden. In time victory should be clear to everyone, and probably fragrant too."
