When designer Anke Wulffen launched Balkon & Garten four years ago, the concept sounded improbable: "not a typical garden magazine with advice about snail repellent," but a self-published zine about plants, with experimental graphic design, a new theme for every issue, and all art and writing contributed by readers. In 2004, the magazine's niche seemed hair-thin: how many art-savvy youngsters cared about seedlings and compost?
Twenty-eight issues later, the answer is obvious: lots and lots. Urban and guerilla gardening movements are spreading to rooftops, empty lots and traffic islands around the globe. Gardening is hip, and so is the model of open participation that community gardens and Balkon & Garten have in common.
The gardening renaissance doesn't surprise Wulffen a bit. In her blog Beton & Garten she has observed hundreds of creative minds doing fresh work with plants, from architects Atelier le Balto to photographer Heidi Specker: all seismographs who presaged the current grassroots movement. "Gardening is simply in the air," she says, in a mass-market society where people are "longing for an idyll, for something of our own."
While her blog documents botanical creativity found around the internet, Balkon & Garten remains a local community for real-life collaborations that grow beyond its pages. Last year, for example, B&G reader-contributors were instrumental in creating Laskerwiesen Park, a new neighborhood garden in Berlin. And, recently, Wulffen and photographer Wolf Klein, who has been writing for B&G since Issue 1, decided to collect his columns into a book. So she branched out from self-publishing to start a small press: Beton + Garten Verlag. This time, it is easy to see she is filling a need. Artist collective Art IG has already asked her to publish their books as well. Their topics? Art, public space and, of course, plants.
Links (all German-language sites):
www.balkon-garten.de
www.balkon-garten.blogspot.com
www.beton-garten.de
