Live in an urban area with little more than a fire escape and a narrow windowsill on which to enact your gardening dreams? Renting a house but lacking permission to dig up the lawn for a garden? Don't despair. Plant on somebody else's land.
Now yes, that's trespassing, but hear me out first.
In every developed region of the planet from small towns to huge cities, there are disturbed but abandoned sites covered with local opportunistic vegetation (also known as weeds, but that's in the eye of the beholder, I don't want to be overly judgmental). It may be a spot where a building was torn down, or a site prepared for a building but the owners were unable to secure permits or financing. It may be a corner dug out for a new highway interchange that got put off for a few years due to budgeting constraints.
What better place to throw in the fast-spreading herbs that thrive on poor soil and that you don't have room for in your own garden, like mint, lemon balm, bee balm, yarrow, parsley, dill, oregano and marjoram.
The trick is this: Throw in seeds or plants you get for free as splits from friends or relatives--you don't want to spend money on an ephemeral planting with no guarantee of how long it will be around to reap the harvest. This still leaves a lot of cheap and free planting choices that will yield culinary and tea herbs to delight you for months to come.
The personal safety rules are this: Don't climb or sneak under fences, approach a barking dog chained to guard the site that looks like it was borrowed from an old junkyard, go near any unstable pits or dirt piles, or dodge no-trespassing signs. This still leaves a lot of available spaces.
The personal health rules? Watch out for poison ivy, and wash plants well before consuming, as you don't what car exhaust or passing stray dogs may have done to the plants when you weren't watching over them.
The ethical rules are this: Do NOT, ever, plant in a wild undisturbed area or in parklands. Invasive species, even those you love like chocolate mint, can wreak havoc on the natural environment and out-compete endangered local species or plants needed for local wildlife habitat. The idea is to plant in areas that are already disturbed and are slated for further disturbance--development, paving, etc.--in the foreseeable future. You are creating your own temporary foraging zones. Also be prepared to share -- should anyone else notice your plantings, they may well dive in and harvest too. Don't fight about it, in fact obviously you share common interests and might make good friends. The plants are not really 'yours,' you are just facilitating their existence in a place you can access.
Not quite at a comfort level for guerilla gardening? Start small -- the little patch of dirt around your street tree, or a small weedy strip between the street and sidewalk. The benefit? Your green plants provided beauty and soil stabilization while they were growing, and left you with a potentially huge harvest of culinary and tea herbs for absolutely free.
And of course, you got a little thrill doing it, too, didn't you...
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