Floating Gardens is a volunteer-based, intercultural, transdisciplinary, and women-led Garden Community that explores how self-organised garden Commons contribute to reimagining and re-creating ways of eco-coexistence in urban space. The planted interspecies permacultures connect some of Floating University’s built structures with the basin’s plantscape and pollinator life while growing a community of creative, terrain-trained biodiversity caretakers.

Since 2019, the Gardens community has met weekly for collective Cultivate with Care sessions from April to November. Together, the participants cultivate a space for botanical practice that reconnects with the living world through place-making, knowledge exchange, and applied reciprocity. What began as a group of leisure gardeners continues to evolve into a socio-ecological infrastructure for collective learning about low-tech biodiverse regeneration practices.

Floating Gardens is a series of experimental plantings that fosters diversity, creates room for self-regulation, and therefore supports habitats and food sources for endangered species. Their cultivation is guided by a local flower scape that feeds insects yet increasingly vanishes from public space (overview of species), combined with climate-resilient plants that support interspecies food sovereignty; and an experimental approach to ecological coexistence through planting.

The plantings evolved through close observation of the site’s ecological cycles, fostering relationships between plants, pollinators, birds, and people. Each Garden features its own planting concept while responding to the site’s microclimate, which is characterized by intense solar and wind exposure, pronounced day-night temperature fluctuations, floods, and droughts. The in-situ and ex-situ Seed Archive keeps alive the plant selection and fosters the gradual adaptation of seasonally replanted species to the site’s demanding environmental conditions.

Current plantings build on previous seasons. The Greenhouse is activated as an in-situ seed archive (since 2021). The Tomato Garden on the upper platform cultivates a variety of non-GMO seeds gifted by Kokopelli in 2018.

Floating Beans and Rose and Berry Grove explore urban food sovereignty in the face of sealed, contaminated, dehydrated, and topsoil-depleted soils. They envision the edible city as a network of interspecies permacultures: prototypes that can be replicated and maintained by eco-informed gardeners throughout the urban landscape, creating freely accessible food sources for humans, pollinators, birds, and rodents.

Floating Gardens Berlin have been listed on the Urban Gardening Map of the Network of Urban Community Gardens (Anstiftung) since 2025.



Floating Gardens embraces synergies with Floating Programmes through activations by Floating KidsUni (since 2018), Open Soil Day #01 (2022), Neighbourhood Week(end)s (Office NN for Neighbourhood Networks), and Climate Care (2023).

Floating Gardens hosts collectives and initiatives, such as kêmi atelier’s Coloring Garden and a Plant-Dyed Sunsails installation in frame of the Floating programme The Sowing Days (2023); and Pollinator Pathmaker with Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (since 2023).

Floating Gardens extends its practice beyond the site through cooperations with cultural programmes and educational institutions, including Kultursommer Berlin: Day of Waste, Day of the Frogs (2022); gardening workshops for Volkshochschule Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain (since 2025); and lectures/panel talks.

2025 – Conserving Through Growing

2024 Species in Partnership, Food for All


2023 Garden Communities as Green Infrastructures 

2022 What’s in the air? Learning from the Life on Site

2021 Sow and Grow: Vegetable Mix

2020 Greening the Floating Iceberg

2019 informal founding of the garden community

Gardens community participants since 2019 all kinds of weeds, Katherine Ball, beans, bees, Lorene Blanche, butterflies, calendula, clover, Elisa Crocs, crows, dirt, Jade Dreyfuss, fresh compost, fireflies, Adriana Gahona, Hannah Greven, Pia Groleger, Valentin Hammoudi, house martins, Laureen Hünig, ipomea, Gilly Karjevsky, Stefan Klopfer, Salome Kofler, kêmi atelier, Martina Kolarek, ladybugs, Bejal Lewis, Ute Lindenbeck, marigolds, Jann Mausen, mosquitoes, Lena Nahrwold, night moths, Nils Palme, Nina Peters, rainwater, Ru, Antonia Schlaich, snails, Antonin Steinke, strawberries, Sophia Tabatadze, Lara Tonon, Karin Weissenbrunner, wild roses, Andrew Wu, Sarah Yaparsidi, and many occasional participants.

Programme Coordinators: Adriana Gahona, Lorene Blanche
Plant bed care: Gardens Community

Texts: Lorene Blanche

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