Images Courtesy of Michael Waldrep.
Let’s say that you’ve never been to Prinzessinnengarten before, let’s say you’ve never even heard of it. One day you’re walking down Hermannstrasse and you decide to turn into the courtyard of an old cemetery. On your left-hand side is a yellow-brick chapel, on your right is a small cafe and in front of you there’s a path leading back into the trees. You follow the path, and for the first few dozen meters it looks like any other graveyard, with headstones of varying sizes and levels of adornment, lots of trees and hedges..
Then you see something that doesn’t belong. Off to the right there’s a series of planter boxes, maybe fifteen in total, painted in bright colours and lush with leaves and vines. A few meters further, on the left side of the path, a small rectangle of earth has been roped off, and the soil inside of it has been tilled. The farther back you go, the more of these things you start to find. Planter boxes abound, and there several plots of land that are being full-on farmed. There are other things, too – a playground built out of branch-wood, a pile of old headstones, a two-meter tall statue of a dog.
Prinzessinnengarten started as a community garden in Moritzplatz, where it followed a trajectory familiar to many urban renewal projects. What began as a forgotten plot of land in a forgotten part of the city was transformed, through love and a lot of hard work, into a vibrant community space. As the area around has been redeveloped, the garden has come under increasing pressure to turn a profit. They exist on short-term leases that get more expensive every year and now have to defend themselves against the very same developers that were drawn there by their garden in the first place. In 2018, a number of the members decided to try something new, on the plot of the St. Jacobi Cemetery, a few kilometres south of the Moritzplatz location.
Images Courtesy of Michael Waldrep.
If the idea of dropping a garden in the middle of a cemetery sounds a bit odd, that’s because it probably should. As of right now, Prinzessinnengarten Jacobi is the only garden in the world producing food on a cemetery plot, or at least the only one of its size with a recognised legal status. Over the course of the past four years, they’ve built a cafe, a hofladen, bee hives, dozens of planter boxes, turned multiple acres into active farmland, repurposed a nail studio into a “community living-room”, and grown far too many kinds of herbs vegetables to try to list.
The story of how this all came together begins in the peaty world of Berlin’s cemetery economy. A large percentage of the cemeteries in Berlin exist on Church land, and the Church is responsible for their upkeep. There are strict limitations on what can be done with the land – you can only put so many bodies into the ground in one place, and there are all sorts of moral and legal hurdles to developing land used for burials, so most cemeteries operate at a slight financial loss. As church memberships and revenues have declined, these spaces have needed to invent ways of making enough money to keep functioning. One solution is to run a cafe, hence the preponderance of coffee shops in Berlin cemeteries. At the Jacobi cemetery, they decided to try something different – the Prinzessinnengarten Collective is responsible for the upkeep of the burial sites, and in exchange, they have a long-term contract from the church to grow and work on the property. They do have a cafe on the property, but it’s also much more than that – the food for the cafe is partly farmed on the property, and the garden serves as not only as a site for education, but also its own sort of autonomous space – you can find people enjoying nature under the trees, or writing in notebooks on the benches, or, yes, mourning their dead.
The fact that Prinzessinnengarten Jacobi has a contract on land that is difficult to commercially develop means that they’re afforded a level of freedom and protection that simply isn’t possible in most community gardens. Whereas some gardens have had to become more profit-oriented to stay on top of their rental contracts, the Jacobi collective has been able to invest their time into the actual work of farming and education. This isn’t, of course, to say that Moritzplatz and other community gardens aren’t also a great asset to their respective communities. There are other creative models for urban farms as well – rooftops, for example, or in certain areas of public parks. But what makes the Jacobi garden particularly exciting is the way that it takes advantage of space that is both commercially and legally insulated from the incursions of real estate development.
Images Courtesy of Michael Waldrep.
There is hope that the Jacobi location can be a model for a type of communal space that is sustainable both from an ecological perspective and a financial and legal one. Part of the trick here is a sort of layering of function – rather than simply occupying an unused plot of land, they are taking an already functional space and augmenting it to serve multiple types of use. Floating Berlin, a project that sits in the rainwater collection basin in Tempelhofer Feld, is another example of this sort of design – it exists literally on top of the other function of the space, without interrupting it.
Likewise, Prinzessinnengarten Jacobi aims to also serve as a place where people can mourn, and even perhaps develop new forms of mourning. Many people continue to come to the cemetery to visit gravesites; some of them have also started to work in the garden, helping to till and plant and tend the earth. None of the gardening happens on the actual gravesites, but the idea that the land where your loved ones rest can also be a generative space, even one that provides nourishment, this means something.