Collective seasonal maintenance practices in a garden in Berlin-Schöneberg. 

Caretakers:
Elisabeth Gruenagel
Lennard Wallmeier
Serenat Yetim
Bojana Bjelic

Text and Image:

© Bojana Bjelic | Earthscapes

Through seasonal pruning and maintenance, the garden is continuously rewritten by decisions of what is permitted to remain and what is allowed to fade. Certain species retreat while others slowly occupy the ground; each year another grass takes hold, altering the balance of the garden almost imperceptibly. Maintenance becomes less an act of control than a form of negotiation with living processes already underway.

The garden exists somewhere between cultivation and surrender: unsettled, adaptive, and perpetually incomplete — an (anti)planetary condition shaped through weather, labour, time, and coexistence.