From poor gardens to community gardens — a 200-year map of Germany's plots

Start with the numbers. The Federal Association of Allotment Garden Clubs of Germany (BKD) counts 867,092 affiliated plots covering 44,000 hectares, with an average plot of 370 square metres. More than 13,000 clubs belong to it, grouped into 20 state associations, and roughly 900,000 gardeners hold a plot. Berlin leads the cities with about 66,000 plots, followed by Leipzig with about 39,000, Hamburg with about 32,000 and Dresden with about 25,000. It is not only the count that stands out. Most of these plots sit on expensive urban land and remain there under legal protection — along railway lines and at the edge of housing districts, on ground any developer would want. Explaining that by climate or national character explains nothing at all.

The explanation is in the statute. The Federal Allotment Gardens Act (BKleingG), enacted on 28 February 1983 and in force from 1 April, defines an allotment as a garden used non-commercially for horticulture and recreation, and its section 3 caps a plot at 400 square metres and a shed at 24 square metres including any roofed terrace. Section 5 is the decisive one: it binds the rent to no more than four times the local going rate for commercial fruit and vegetable growing. However far urban land values climb, the ground rent on an allotment stays near farmland levels. Because the rent is decoupled from the price of the land, the plot can stay in the middle of the city. Remove that cap and Germany's allotments would be gone within a few years.

But the statute is where two hundred years arrived, not where they began. The 400-square-metre figure in its text was settled in Kiel in 1830, and the idea of forbidding termination first appears in an ordinance of 1919. The Act itself was written as the legislature's response to a Federal Constitutional Court ruling of 12 June 1979 (BVerfGE 52, 1), which found the old allotment law unconstitutional. Both the machinery that protects and the plots being protected have been rebuilt each time round. This institution, in other words, has never once been safe. The plots lasted two hundred years not because someone kept loving gardens but because each era supplied a different mechanism. Each era gets its own instalment from day two onward; today hands over only the route.

This site already carries two exploration columns on German plots. Urban Farming in Germany: 150 Years from Schreber's Garden reads them from the side of landscape and culture — the Schreber movement in nineteenth-century Leipzig, the culture of the Laube and the garden gnome, the plots that migrant women started, and the edible-city movement. Hitler and Migge: Subsistence Gardens in the Age of 'Blood and Soil' follows the inversion by which a garden that had been a tool of emancipation was absorbed into Nazi agrarian ideology, pivoting on the life and thought of the landscape architect Leberecht Migge (1881–1935). People, ideas and landscape belong to those two. This series does not repeat them.

This series looks at four devices. First, the law: the clauses that decide who may lease which land, at what price, and for how long. Second, the organisation: the membership association, the Verein, running from the first club in Leipzig in 1864 through the national federation founded on 21 August 1921 to today's 13,000-plus clubs in 20 state associations. Third, land and money: who owns the ground, what the rent is, and how much the public purse carries. Fourth, foundations: whose funding sustains the new gardens that fall outside the statutory frame. None of these four has anything to do with loving a garden. And it was these, not the love, that decided whether the plots would last two hundred years.