Berlin yesterday: Book, photo, film

Stills from Flip Flop by Anke 

Yesterday was an eventful day for Urban Plant Research in Berlin. I had a visit in the studio with Anke from the artistic-botanic small press Beton + Garten Verlag, which is working with us on our first Urban Plant Research book.

Stockton, CA: “Family Sees Image Of Michael Jackson In Tree Stump”

Photo courtesy CBS

Though perhaps a bit off topic, this CBS13 article from my hometown, “Family Sees Image Of Michael Jackson In Tree Stump,” was too good to go unmentioned. Talk about plants making shapes and speaking to us! And holding mirrors up to our minds…

Berlin: Rose of Jericho, revisited

About this time last year, I bought a Rose of Jericho at a tea shop. The Rose of Jericho is a plant that looks brown and dead until it is watered. Then unfurls, turning green in the center and smelling like the forest floor.

San Francisco: the fantastic, the amazing Living Roof!

The amazing Megan of Megamoog recently photographed this bizarre-looking green roof and shared it on her Flickr photostream. Though I have been feeling like there are just too many stories about green rooves in the news these days, this one had such a cute, alien, submarine-spaceship look that I had to find out more, so I asked Megan for the scoop. It turns out that this is no average green roof, but something much more wonderful.

Berlin: Visit our community garden on Saturday

Unlike Phyllis, I don’t have a backyard to garden in, but I am a member of a young community garden, Bürgergarten Laskerwiese. Anke recently photographed me weeding my vegetable bed there, 10 square meters (90 square feet) which I share with Marko. You are invited to visit us this Saturday, when the gardeners will be hosting an open house as part of the Berlin-wide festival Langer Tag der Stadtnatur (Long Day of Urban Nature).

Brooklyn: Garden space

My roommate Phyllis working in her vegetable garden in the overgrown garden in our backyard. Bird’s eye view.

Brooklyn: Mystery plant grows right through chain link fence

On a walk through Gowanus yesterday, at Union St. and 4th Ave., I was attracted by this monster of a weed because of its billowing, large shape and its adjacency to two other interesting things: a billboard and a vacant lot.

A new guidebook about Berlin’s urban plants

It looks like Sara and Leslie are not the only curious duo hot on the trails of Berlin’s wild plants. This new guidebook, to be published this summer, also finds two creative women, Heiderose Häsler and Iduna Wünschmann, seeking out often-overlooked plants and researching their connection to the people and history of the city. 

Titled Berliner Pflanzen: Das wilde Grün der Großstadt (Berlin Plants: The Wild Greenery of the City), the book is presented by a small publishing house called Edition Terra that specializes in guidebooks about Germany, with a special focus on trees and gardens (and windmills!).

New York trees wear urban tumbleweeds

Speaking of “urban tumbleweeds,” a.k.a. plastic bags and other trash blown through the city, I began to notice back in early spring just how many street trees have some kind of trash caught in them. It’s probably not so apparent now that the trees have grown their full summer coat of foliage, but back then the number was astonishing. Nearly every tree I passed had some kind of plastic bag, ragged rag, bit of orange construction mesh, or other scrap adorning its bare branches, as if this were some kind of fashion trend for trees.

Berlin: Taking zucchinis for a walk

Here’s a picture from an urban plant incident that spotaneously happened a few weeks ago. I was wondering how to transport four gangly zucchini seedlings from my apartment to the community garden. Luckily some friends dropped by to invite us for a stroll. So we took the zucchinis for their first trip outside. Maybe we should take our plants for walks more often. Why should dogs have all the fun?