Over the past 500 years the common spaces and places of Britain have been the grounds on which national political strategies have been played out. From the diggers and levellers of the English revolution through to the recent issues over the development of our cities – most recently around Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens and Carltongate in Edinburgh.

The management and ownership of common land - and land for the common good - remains a live issue. In Scotland, these issues have a specific history and a contemporary repository of these issues and actions can be found on the Common Weal website.

The idea of the commons has also had great currency in the development of the on-line environment. The notion of the common good and the preservation of on-line space for personal expression and creative freedom has seen the development of concepts such as the creative commons licence and the development of shared industrial spaces for the creation of open-source software.

However many of those engaged with this activity recognise that these concepts are not new, nor unique to the on-line world and make explicit references to historical antecedents – including one of the most pre-eminent urban designers of the late 19th century – who himself was active in the Carltongate area of Edinburgh – Patrick Geddes.

Geddes wrote extensively on the nature of public space, often linking together a sense of the organic through his work as Professor of Botany at Dundee University, with a vision of the growing city, expanding from an industrial base to provide a growing, nurturing environment.

This project collides the work of many people, both from the global guerilla gardening movement and from those whose interest is in the city as database or a space for applied cultural intervention. In this project the elements of a botanic narrative are placed in spaces across the city, each with a reference to a web domain which links all the locations together and provides the over-arching framework for the work.