Berlin Plants give a heads up on some of the city’s urban foliage…

Visitors to Berlin are bound to discover the multifaceted nature of the city, which openly manifests itself in the architectural imprints of its recent divided history and the thriving nocturnal hipster scene.

Summer visitors might also be struck by the lushness of its green spaces and impressive tally of nearly half a million trees – not to mention the abundance of other plants and shrubs springing up in between buildings and sidewalks.

The numerous parks dotting the city often invite aesthetic contemplation of urban nature while also housing reminders of the Second World War in the form of memorials and bunker relics. In fact, the deep roots of many trees and plants in Berlin mingle with the tangible consequences of the violent tides of history: war rubble.

Large-scale manipulations of the landscape have steadily accompanied the city’s evolution, and the hilly parks in an otherwise flat Berlin are often nothing but giant, re-greened heaps of war rubble.

In addition to the many culinary uses of plants, the botanical world provides a unique and often overlooked lens through which to view our own history on both a local and global scale.

Home to well over a thousand different plant species, Berlin’s green spaces provide excellent grounds for the aspiring urban forager or amateur ethnobotanist to cover. In order to share our botanical adventures with others, last year we began writing a blog in which we detail our discoveries. Here are few excerpts from our favorite posts…

Where the wild hop grows (among the remnants of the Berlin Wall)

The still largely undeveloped no man’s land along the former Berlin wall provides a sanctuary for many wild plants that would otherwise be regimented to more formal landscape practices. These abandoned spaces serve an important function because their lack of landscape architecture helps disrupt the plant blindness often found in city dwellers.

The familiar patterns of trees lining a street one after the other, neatly trimmed bushes and m…