Berlin: Red ivy dude says, “Hi”

By the Lidl supermarket parking lot on Sonnenallee in Berlin-Neukölln a couple weeks ago…

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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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Berlin: Vine

Spotted a work of art on a building in the gallery area of Berlin-Mitte.

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Amsterdam: Ivy devouring abandoned bike

The photographer of today’s startling urban plant picture, titled Nature wins, is Cécile Obertop. Not surprisingly, she lives in Amsterdam, one of the most bike-centric cities in Europe. While I think it’s great that much of the population commutes by bike instead of driving, which you’d think could only mean good things for the environment and contribute to a clean, green city, talking to Cécile about this picture made me realize that the bike situation is not always a bed of roses.

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Berlin: Primary colors, fall plants

Spotted in Prenzlauer Berg yesterday, plants in RGB…

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Fort Collins, Colorado: urban plants with Holly Wolsey

Dear readers, Holly Wolsey’s plant photos are so charming, I’m hoping they’ll make you forget all about the past week of no Urban Plant Research posts. (I’m sorry, it’s been busy hereabouts!) Holly’s a photographer in Colorado who I recently met, who actually doesn’t particularly focus on plants – she’s a professional portrait photographer as well as a wonderful documenter of daily life – but I just love her plant photos and her eye for the beauty of little plants and trees in the city. So I’m going to share a whole bunch of them today.

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London: Plant squatters in Hackney

We interrupt our report on Basel’s plants to bring you this photo from new reader and urban plant scout Millay, depicting some leafy Londoners squatting an apartment in a building that is still partially occupied.

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Brooklyn: Nighttime weeds along the Gowanus Canal

On a recent warm night while traversing the Gowanus Canal, I spied a couple suspicious green characters lurking about, like this many-headed ivy monster…

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Brooklyn: Climbing plants (in and out of control)

With the ivy-graffiti still on my mind, I’d like to share some more amazing instances of climbing plants I’ve discovered in Park Slope. This photograph that I took a little while ago, with its lush, dark ivy, reminds me of Leslie’s photograph of Juncker’s Hotel Garni, minus the beautiful way the ivy flows into windowboxes.

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Brooklyn: Ivy-graffiti, revisited

Last fall, I was impressed by the multi-colored transformation of ivy on the side of a building above the Prospect Highway, which outdid the artistry of the graffiti underneath it. To my dismay, I recently discovered that the ivy has been cut back and entirely removed from the lower part of the wall, leaving a mass of dead leaves on dead branches still clinging to higher part of the wall, extending almost to the roof, out of reach.

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