Blooming capital city charm with flourishing traffic lights
The ‘1000 gute Gründe’ (1000 good reasons) initiative shows that flowers don't just belong on the windowsill. With its disco, Späti pub and green living room, Blütenkiez Berlin is both an oasis of cal
There is a new stop in Charlottenburg. In the middle of 1,250 square metres of flowerbeds and a 50-metre-long stream, the ‘Blütenkiez Berlin’ stop is located directly on the Frühlingsbrücke bridge between Blumenburger Platz and the street ‘Unter den Kiefern’.
Strolling through the flower hall gives you the feeling of walking right through Berlin: House fronts alternate with full rubbish bins, there is a full shopping trolley in the middle of the Späti and there is even a disco next to zebra crossings, traffic cones, street art and scaffolding. The difference between Hall 2.2 and everyday life in Berlin in January? Everything is in bloom. An impressive flower arrangement fills the shopping trolley, a sea of flowers spills out of the bins, ivy and ferns entwine around the traffic cones and flowers also sprout from a telephone box.
‘We have tried to round off the concept at every point,’ says Anne Kreisel, project manager at Landgard, who is responsible for the design of the flower hall at Grüne Woche as part of the “1,000 good reasons” initiative. ‘We want to make flowers and plants interesting for a younger target group,’ says Kreisel. That's what ‘1,000 good reasons’ stands for and that's also what the concept in the flower hall, which is intended to be both an oasis of calm and a social media hotspot, stands for.
Dancing under the floral sky
In the ‘Blütenbeats’ disco, visitors can dance to black light and music or relax in the green living room and on the numerous other seating areas. Those who carefully follow the QR codes on the floor or on the postcards on display and correctly answer questions such as: ‘How many doorbell signs hang at number twelve?’ or: ‘How many shopping trolleys are in the Späti?’ have the chance to win a city bike. Healthy plant-based snacks such as bowls, wraps, banana bread, avocado bread, brownies and smoothies are available at the ‘1000 good reasons’ food truck.
Gardening expert Detlef Steves will also be a guest here tomorrow (18 January).
People like to stop in front of the hanging basket
‘We put a lot of energy into this,’ says Anne Kreisel. 800 cubic metres of substrate are installed in the hall, 80,000 plants, including 100 large trees and shrubs, some up to nine metres tall, such as pines, birches and cedars. Since 12 December, both the Landgard team and numerous service providers such as GaLaBau have been busy designing the flower hall. Florist Sonja Heidelbach and Anna-Katharina Overesch from Blumenlina have decorated a traffic light system with cut flowers: First craspedia, also known as drumsticks, then anthuriums (flamingo flowers) and tillandsias. If you pay attention, you can recognise the colours red, yellow and green. ‘Yes, we thought of something,’ says Anna-Katharina Overesch and laughs. Her team has designed around 30 objects that can be used as photo spots during Grüne Woche. The decorations are a hit: ‘I haven't seen such beautifully flourishing traffic lights in Berlin for a long time,’ says one visitor.
