The pansies are already blooming.

The kale is harvested.

In the shadow of the FAZ editorial office, residents of Frankfurt's Gallus district have laid out more than thirty raised beds on the green median strip of Frankenallee.

They have been sowing and harvesting together in “Gallusgarten 2” for three years.

"We take care of biodiversity below and above ground," explains initiator Ralf Hart.

Because the "sustainable neighborhood garden" in the traditional workers' quarter should also promote integration as an intercultural garden.

Claudia Schulke

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

The Parks Department supports them in this.

In 2007, activists from the “Art in the North End” initiative planted more than a hundred sunflowers on the median of Friedberger Landstrasse in the trendy north end of Frankfurt.

In the neighboring Lortzingstraße, the city unsealed 120 square meters of parking spaces and filled them with earth to compensate for felled trees.

A residents' initiative planted daffodils, onions and other things.

Beekeeper and “edible city”

The climate should also benefit from such citizen commitment, which is spreading worldwide under the term urban gardening.

As early as the 1970s, more than forty open-neighborhood community gardens had been created on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In this country, citizens in Cologne, Nuremberg, Bremen and Hamburg are now gardening together.

The Humboldt University in Berlin established a professorship for urban horticulture in 2003 and for urban ecophysiology of plants since 2009.

Unlike the so-called guerrilla gardeners, who, also in the New York tradition, plant seeds on urban wasteland on their own initiative, the community gardeners work together with the municipal authorities.

Closely related but not identical is the concept of the “Edible City” developed in England and Toronto in 2008.

The following year Kassel and Andernach followed with municipal projects.

The “Edible City” has not yet been defined uniformly in this country, and the initiatives for urban food cultivation are still being set up.

Berlin has the most space to offer for its city gardeners.

However, only the residents of the inner-city neighborhoods are involved.

More than 500 citizens are active in gardening in the “Commons Account” on Tempelhofer Feld alone.

Eleven years ago, the first city gardeners settled where planes used to take off and land.

In the meantime, more than 250 registered raised beds with vegetables have been ordered here.

A few days ago the "gardening" started.

On the so-called Red Island in Berlin-Schöneberg, ten raised beds were created by the TU in 2016 and awarded in several languages.

This small intercultural "island garden" on Gotenstraße, where herbs and vegetables grow, is intended to promote integration as a joint project of the "Über den Tellerrand" and "Soul Garden" initiatives.

There is also a beekeeping group.

130 species on one balcony

Urban gardening includes individual but well-connected balcony gardeners with their trend towards natural and organic balconies.

Katharina Heuberger has created a paradise for wildflowers on the fifth floor of a residential complex between Munich Central Station and Donnersbergerbrücke.

Scientists have identified more than 130 species of insects and birds on their ten square meter balcony.

Paper wasps land on blue scented nettles, goldfinches nibble on the milk seeds of cornflowers, butterflies sip nectar from the viper's bugloss.

"The wild bees are already hatching, I sowed annual field wildflowers in March," she says.

"In our heavily sealed settlement areas with few flowers, every flower pot with native wild plants is an asset to biodiversity.

Geraniums are ecologically pointless.

Four squirrels grew up on Birgit Schattling's balcony in Berlin.

She cultivates useful and wild plants for her self-sufficiency.

She has just offered her 9th Online Bio-Balcony Congress on biological animal-friendly gardening in a small space.

This weekend (April 2nd to 4th), interviews and lectures with and by experts on the subject are accessible free of charge at www.bio-balkon.de.