Berlin-Neukölln: Air plants at the Saturday market

Two surprises awaited me this past Saturday as I took a walk from Neukölln to Kreuzberg, getting acclimated in Berlin again after a week in the heat of Spain. First, I realized that one of my favorite greenmarkets, the “Turkish market” (held on Tuesdays and Fridays on Maybachufer), has spun off a third, Saturday market dedicated to fabrics and handcrafts. There, I was doubly surprised to find an airy, minimal stand in shades of dusty green and creamy white, offering an array of strange air plants with nary a root or speck of soil in sight.

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Berlin: Cardboard tulips at Sylee’s

“Make your own sunshine,” Sylee titled the blog post on Berlin Reified featuring her photos of this make-your-own tulips kit, made here in Berlin. Yes, we must make our own sunshine here in the gray city at the moment, holding our breaths, waiting for spring to come and bring us the real thing!

Photo by Sylee Gore, Berlin Reified 

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New Haven: Snowdrops and Gardenclips

I was already planning to celebrate the recent appearance of this year’s first snowdrops with a post of some sort. Then I found out that my friend Eric Larson, manager of Yale’s Marsh Botanical Garden, introduces this little white early bird of a flower in the latest video he’s hosted for an internet project called GardenClips.

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Miami: Shade Tree installation Friday, Dec. 7

For one day only, a very odd tree in Miami will become a pop-up art gallery and installation site for an  event entitled Shade Tree. Tomorrow, December 6, artist Barron Sherer informed us via email, he and William Keddell will be showing a site-specific work about this large tree which has grown right through and around a chain link fence.

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Chicago: Christmas tree stood up, in November

Yesterday, artist Matt Maldre published this photo of an enormous Christmas tree jumping the gun, standing to attention over a month before Christmas. He wrote on his Instagram feed:

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Berlin: Ivy snuggles up to stockinged drainpipe

Outfitted by guerrilla-knitting street artists, this Berlin drainpipe offers a warm surface for an ivy vine on a cold November day.

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New Haven area: photography by Jordan Nodelman

Yellow Line, photograph by Jordan Nodelman

Can plants in the suburbs also be considered urban plants, or is their situation completely different? What about places like Greater New Haven, Connecticut, that feel urban in some areas and like suburbia in others? Can interesting frictions be observed between plants and the human environment in these places? During my recent trip to New Haven’s City-Wide Open Studios, I had the privelege of meeting and seeing the work of a local artist, Jordan Nodelman, who is exploring the built environment of this area (and others) and often captures plants in relation to man-made structures of all sorts. Read on for more…

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New York blog tip: local ecologist

Photo courtesy of local ecologist.

local ecologist is a super-knowledgable urban ecology blog in New York, with whom Urban Plant Research has long been exchanging ideas and comments, and whom we are long overdue in recommending. From lovely photos and accurate IDs of local fruits and foliage (as in the picture above, of hawthorn) to investigations of urban space and architecture, local ecologist reports on a wide variety of subjects and is packed with in-depth information.

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Berlin: Knit for the trees

Tackily dressed, but warm, tree spotted in Samariter Kiez in Berlin-Friedrichshain.

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Hamburg: “Ultra plants” exhibition opens tonight

Artist duo Iris-a-Maz invite us all to their new video installation, Ultra Plants, opening tonight, May 11, in Hamburg. As fellow artistic investigators of urban plants who have contributed insights and images to Urban Plant Research in the past, Iris-a-Maz have now turned their attention to so-called weeds.

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