Late in the night of Thursday Nov. 1, 2007, a group of students congregated on the south end of the clock tower lawn at Pitzer, gardening tools in hand. They carried with them eight fruit trees, bought with their own money. They dug eight holes in the south clock tower lawn and placed the eight saplings in their bed for the night and patted the dirt snug around them. Having completed their mission, they left the scene trying to act natural about carrying shovels across campus in the dark hours before dawn.

At 8:30a.m., only a few hours later, few students had awoken on the foggy Friday morning to see the eight new additions to the campus landscaping, but Pitzer Grounds staff had. They immediately removed the trees from their transient home on the clock-tower lawn. Several students who had gotten word that the trees were being removed looked on from the mounds.

The following day at the Pitzer reggae fest "One Good Thing" (formerly Bobfest), a representative announced from the stage to attending reggae fans what had taken place and its purpose. He explained that the water-guzzling, ecosystem-defying grass monoculture does not belong in the Southern California desert, and it is unsustainably draining the distant water resources from which L.A. imports. A segue to the next act, one band member yelled, "Yeah, Pitzer! Let’s plant some trees!" Another waxed poetic about the connection from green living to the green cannabis leaf.

In an anonymous 1,771 word email sent out by the guerilla gardeners, they said that this was a destructive act that silenced community dialogue. "No students were allowed to ponder the meaning of the trees, to make their own decisions about them, to form their own thoughts, or to join onto a movement of creating direct action and consciousness. Instead, they were taken and disposed of. Along with the trees, student's voices were disposed of and deemed invalid," they said.

They wanted to open up public discourse on the topic, they said. "Our ‘green’ school ripped fruit trees from the ground, trees that would have produced food for generations to enjoy right here on campus supporting sustainable agriculture."

While they wanted to show that it was not preposterous to allow other forms of vegetation to coexist, "The mono-culture of green grass in the Southern Californian desert was reinforced and normalized," they said. Fifty percent of the Claremont Colleges’ water use must be imported unsustainably from the Colorado River and San Fransisco Delta. About 50 percent is used in landscaping, according to the Claremont Colleges Sustainability Audit.

"At the very least, the Pitzer Community deserved a chance to see the trees for themselves and the group of students who planted them deserved the forum for their voices to be heard," they said in the email, signed "a group of concerned students."

Joe Clements, the manager of the Pitzer Arboretum and Grounds Department, said "I took it upon myself to take them out." The Grounds Department saw the trees as a mean-spirited prank aimed at the Grounds workers, Clements said, comparing them to graffiti.

The trees were removed before the upper administration had heard about the event. Pitzer President Laura Skandera Trombley at the Pitzer community meeting held on the 13th, said "I didn’t know about the trees for some time," directing questions to the two representatives from Grounds at the meeting, Joe Clements and Chris VanDemark.

Clements said, "If students came to me and said ‘We want to plant some trees,’ we would pretty much plant whatever, but in the right area." The area was needed for other purposes, Clements said. The trees would not have survived there under current water provided for the lawn, he said. The students begged to differ. "Work with the system and we’ll work with you," Clements said.

"We must give each other the chance to express ourselves outside of the conventional bureaucratic form," the guerilla gardeners said in their email. "This campus is ours also. It should not be a novel idea that students would get together and decide to do responsible, ecological landscaping on our own campus without ‘asking for permission’ or going through bureaucracy."

Environmental studies professor Paul Faulstich said at the community meeting, "I look forward to having more community meetings before we resort to guerilla gardening." While Pomona Farm is the result of well-thought-out guerilla gardening, he said, this effort "wasn’t a program that thought about where these plants are and the area they’re in."

The students said the action originated in student dissatisfaction with the administration’s lack of communication and involvement of students in decision making processes. "The original intent of the planting of these trees was not a confrontational one. It was a movement of questioning and action. Discussion is great, necessary, and a key component to change. However, discussion can only get us so far. When three years of discussion led to our exclusion from such vital issues such as the environmental sustainability of the college and its future expansion, it became time to act," they said.

"We will not have our dissenting opinions silenced. The planting of those trees was just one manifestation of our voice," they said. They have circulated a petition in the dining hall and over the internet to get the trees returned.