Virtual food forests!

Guerrilla Grafters is a San Francisco based team of guerrilla gardeners whose mission is to “Undo civilization one branch at a time” by grafting fruit-bearing branches onto city-planted ornamental fruit trees. The technique works best when grafting fruit-bearing cherry branches onto ornamental cherry trees, plum branches onto ornamental plums, pear branches onto ornamental pears, etc. Their ultimate aim is to “turn city streets into food forests.” Although this utopian dream might sound innocuous, the guerrilla gardeners have repeatedly run into trouble with the the San Francisco Department of Public Works who’s in charge of the city’s 103,000 public trees: the local government is afraid of fruits getting crushed on the sidewalk, people slipping, getting injured, and possibly filing lawsuits against the city. Viewed in this light, grafting is considered vandalism and fines have even been issued for damaging city property.

Supporters of then Guerrilla Grafters movement are encouraged to download and laser-cut a stencil on the website with the official “Guerrilla Grafting” logo: http://www.guerrillagrafters.org/category/guerrilla-art/   However, this logo is not very clear - to the uninformed passerby, the word “grafting” is more likely to suggest money gained by illicit means than a cherry-bearing tree branch. And the grafting itself takes time, so even a successfully grafted branch will bear fruit for many months. The process is slow and non-glamorous. Even though many articles have been written about the guerrilla grafters movement, they haven't gained much traction in the city since they started in 2011.  

My design is very simple: a cherry to stencils directly onto the trunk of the tree itself, to show what the city could look like with real fruit on the trees. This would give city-dwellers a visual sense of the Guerrilla Grafters’ dream: a food forest on the streets.

Note: In order not to harm the trees, you would have to use a non-toxic product such as milk- or clay-based paint http://www.unearthedpaints.com/pages/what-are-natural-paints