A plea for natural gardens

I just moved to another city and what I didn’t know was that the one I come from was already very advanced with urban gardening. In Potsdam and also Berlin, a lot of spaces are often used for wild green – urban backyard gardens, balconies overloaded with boxes of herbes and flowers, natural gardens in front of the houses. It’s by far not perfect, there is also lot of grey and sealed up surfaces, but… you can find green wild.

Where I moved now, many people at least for my first impression seem to like quite well-arranged gardens. Or even non all.

It looks tidy, that’s true. And this one definitively doesn’t make a lot work. True, too.

But wouldn’t it be great and even more fun to have more green, more colors, more nature in our cities? Maybe even edibles? One fun fact is that you can garden and green up spaces nearly everythere with everything.

A drawer with lavender, a little sunflower and some other late-bloomers

And nature wants to come back, even if we don’t do anything at all.

There are a couple of marvellous points about having more nature in the city: It deeply improves our life quality as we’re just enjoying our surrounding so much more. Plants and trees filter the air and therefore provide fresh, clean air. Greened up spaces close to buildings as the one you just saw, help to survive heavy rain precipitation as they absorb a part of the rainfall which otherwise would overflood our caves.

This permeable pavement is a parking spaces and a green space at the same time. It’s efficiently able to absorb and store water during heavy precipitations. In addition these green surfaces evaporate water again during hot times and cool down the micro climate.

A green parking space – isn’t that wonderful?

If you allow wild spaces in your garden, you’ll with a high probability find something to eat, even next to something very decorative as the nettles on the following pictures. Nettles are very healthy and can be prepared as spinach or as a tea (see one of my other posts).