Research & reports

· Wikipedia · Germany

Moritz Schreber (1808–1861) was a German medical doctor and university lecturer born in Leipzig, who became director of the Leipzig Heilanstalt in 1844 and wrote about children's health and the social effects of urbanization. The eponymous 'Schreber movement' arose only after his death; the first Schrebergarten was established in 1864 by Leipzig school principal Ernst Innozenz Hauschild, who leased land for children's physical exercise.

· Wikipedia (de) · Germany

German Kleingärten (allotment gardens) trace back to early-19th-century 'poor gardens' (Armengärten), with the first Schreber plot opened in Leipzig's Johannapark in 1865. Today about 15,000 clubs organized under 20 state federations and the national umbrella BKD manage roughly 867,092 registered plots, out of over 1 million plots nationwide covering about 46,000 hectares. The average plot size is 370 m²; as of 2008 the average transfer fee was €1,900 (€3,300 in large cities), average annual cost was €373, and the average user age was 60.

· Wikipedia (de) · Germany

Prinzessinnengärten was founded by the non-profit 'Nomadisch Grün' in July 2009 and operated an urban farm at Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg (between Prinzenstraße and Oranienstraße), on roughly 6,000 m² of land that had lain fallow for over 60 years. Within a month of opening it had 100 growing beds, later expanded by 300 more, using a mobile container-based structure with plants grown in recycled bread crates, Tetra Paks, and rice sacks. It kept four beehives from September 2009, opened a garden café in 2010, expanded a garden kitchen in 2011, and won the Utopia Award in 2010.

· Wikipedia (de) · Germany

The city of Andernach's 'Edible City' (Essbare Stadt) project plants vegetables, fruit, and grain on municipal green spaces under the motto 'picking allowed' (Pflücken erlaubt), letting residents harvest freely. It was first presented in 2010 at the federal 'Entente Florale' competition, where Andernach received several awards, and was subsequently extended to further areas in the city center, along the old city wall, and near the train station.

· Wikipedia · Germany

The Intercultural Garden movement was founded in 1996 in Göttingen, Germany, partly on the initiative of migrant families, with an association formally established in 1998. It began with just three gardens in Göttingen but had grown by early 2006 to about 300 members from about twenty countries, while around the same period thirty independent garden projects existed nationwide with more being created. The Munich-based foundation Stiftung Interkultur coordinates and supports garden projects across Germany.

Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv Berlin · Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv Berlin (公式サイト) · Germany

Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv Berlin has worked on education and participation since 2009. It relocated from its original Moritzplatz site in 2020 and is now based at the Neuer St. Jacobi Friedhof cemetery in Neukölln. Its activities include green-space conservation and community gardening, ecology workshops, running the neighborhood facility 'studio nagelneu' and the cultural event space 'Kiezkapelle', environmental education, guided tours, a café-restaurant, and garden projects for companies, schools, and social institutions.

Plantlife · Plantlife · United Kingdom

An overview of Plantlife's 'No Mow May' campaign, urging people in the UK to stop mowing their lawns during May to let wildflowers grow and support bees and butterflies. The page states that approximately 97% of the UK's flower-rich meadows have been lost since the 1930s, and notes there are around 23 million gardens in the UK, meaning even small patches can add up. It encourages extending the practice beyond May into a year-round 'No Mow Movement' of managing lawns with mixed grass lengths for nature.

NHS England · NHS England · United Kingdom

NHS England's official page on 'social prescribing', a form of personalised care in which GPs and other health professionals refer patients via link workers to non-clinical, community-based support (group activities, advice services, etc.), centred on the question 'what matters to me?'. It targets people with one or more long-term conditions, those needing low-level mental health support, people who are socially isolated or lonely, and those with complex social needs. NHS England set a goal of at least 900,000 people being referred to social prescribing by 2023/24.

Incredible Edible Todmorden · Incredible Edible Todmorden · United Kingdom

The official site of Incredible Edible Todmorden, the UK grassroots movement that plants and shares free-to-harvest vegetables, fruit and herbs in public spaces around the town. It runs with no office, no paid staff and no major funding, and states that the wider Incredible Edible network now numbers over 700 groups worldwide.

Centre for Mental Health · Centre for Mental Health · United Kingdom

This Centre for Mental Health article describes Sydenham Garden, a community resource in Lewisham, London, whose green space supports mental health through contact with nature, growing and cooking food, and creative activities. About 370 people a year join as 'co-workers' on placements of up to 12 months, and the piece frames the garden as an antidote to loneliness, isolation and exclusion.

Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · United Kingdom

A donation page for the RHS Campaign for School Gardening, stating that over 30,800 schools and groups across the UK already receive support and around 2.1 million children take part in gardening activities through the campaign.

Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) · United Kingdom

The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) runs a campaign to make plants "an integrated part of everyday school life," offering free biannual newsletters, online training courses, a five-level School Gardening Award, and a library of activity plans and teaching guides. It also offers guided and self-guided school visits to RHS gardens and a biodiversity project with the Natural History Museum (the National Education Nature Park). The page does not state specific participation figures such as the number of schools involved.

Plinth · Plinth · United Kingdom

Published 5 April 2026 and updated 14 June 2026. Full cost recovery means funders covering not only a project's direct costs but its proportional share of overheads — rent, finance, IT, HR and chief-executive time. The article works through an example where two of ten staff (20 per cent of capacity) deliver a project, so £28,000 of £140,000 in annual overheads is added to £85,000 of direct costs for a £113,000 budget, and notes that overhead rates of 15–25 per cent are common sector guidance. It argues that accepting grants below true cost is a structural funding problem rather than a budgeting error, with consequences including staff burnout and governance risk, and notes that charity staff earn roughly 7 per cent less per hour than equivalent roles elsewhere in the economy.

Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Germany

The national statistics page of the German federation of allotment garden associations (BKD). It gives the base figures — 867,092 plots, 44,000 hectares, an average plot of 370 square metres — along with the three-tier structure of roughly 13,000 clubs, 502 district federations and 20 state federations, membership by state, and a ranking of plots in the 15 largest cities (Berlin about 66,000, Leipzig 39,000). The nationwide average wait for a plot is three years, rising to seven in Berlin and eight in Hamburg. It also shows the skew by which the eastern states excluding Berlin, holding 15 per cent of the population, contain more than half of all allotments.

Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte · Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte · Germany

An encyclopaedia entry from the Society for Schleswig-Holstein History. It dates the appearance of 'poor gardens' in the duchies to the end of the 1820s and records that by 1826 they existed in 19 towns. In 1830 the Society of Voluntary Friends of the Poor in Kiel allocated plots on the municipal land at the Prüner Schlag at a size of 400 square metres — a size the entry says still holds today. The initiative is attributed to the governor Landgrave Carl of Hesse (1744–1836); the entry notes that the later allotment movement begun by the Leipzig physician D. M. Schreber (1808–1861) turned the poor gardens into Schrebergärten.

VGT Gartenfreunde Treptow e. V. · VGT Gartenfreunde Treptow e. V. · Germany

A source page in which the Berlin-Treptow garden association explains the Allotment and Small-Lease Ordinance of 31 July 1919 clause by clause. Section 1 put the rent for non-commercial horticultural land in the hands of the lower administrative authority, to be set in light of local conditions and land values after consulting agricultural and horticultural experts. Section 3 barred the landlord from terminating the lease, gave the holder a right to convert a loan for use into a lease, and a right to demand renewal once a term expired. Under section 4 an allotment office was set up in the Treptow district administration, which lasted until 1938. The association's 1948 statutes, the page notes, still referred back to the 1919 ordinance.

· Wikipedia (Deutsch) · Germany

The article on the history and scale of Germany's national allotment federation. Founded on 21 August 1921 as the Reich federation of German allotment associations, it later became the Bundesverband Deutscher Gartenfreunde and took its present name on 9 September 2023. It now covers more than 13,000 clubs and 20 state bodies, some 900,000 plots on 44,000 hectares used by around five million people — an area equal to 0.25 per cent of Germany's agricultural land. The article also carries the historical figures for 1938: one million members on 45,000 hectares, producing 350 million kg of fruit and 300 million kg of vegetables.

· Wikipedia (Deutsch) · Germany

The article on the VKSK, East Germany's national allotment organisation. Founded in Leipzig on 29 November 1959, it held the exclusive right to establish allotment sites. Membership stood at about 850,000 in 1962 and reached roughly 1.5 million by 1988. An extraordinary congress on 27 October 1990 resolved to dissolve the body with effect from 31 December 1990, and its gardeners and clubs passed into the all-German federation that followed.

· Wikipedia (Deutsch) · Germany

The article on Germany's intercultural gardens. The pilot project grew out of the initiative of immigrant families in Göttingen-Geismar in 1996, and as of 2025 more than 400 intercultural garden projects exist across the country. Support centres on the Stiftung Interkultur in Munich, described as a creation of the foundation partnership anstiftung & ertomis. The association at the movement's origin, Internationale Gärten e. V. Göttingen, was set up in 1998 and runs three gardens covering 11,000 square metres with around 70 families from 25 countries.

Landesverband Berlin der Gartenfreunde e. V. · Landesverband Berlin der Gartenfreunde e. V. · Germany

The Berlin state federation of garden friends tracing its own history. It counts roughly 40,000 'Pflanzer' in Berlin between 1890 and 1910 and places the origin of today's federation in the April 1901 union of all planter associations of Berlin and its surroundings. After a series of First World War emergency decrees capped rent increases and obliged municipalities to provide land for cultivation, the Allotment and Small-Lease Ordinance of 31 July 1919 imposed rent control, banned leasing for profit and allowed land to be secured compulsorily. On 20 October 1919 the board of Berlin's colonists voted to rename their body the central federation of German allotment associations; by 1929 the Berlin provincial federation had 66,570 members, and that year Rehberge in Wedding opened as what the page calls Germany's first permanent allotment colony.

Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Bundesverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands (BKD) · Germany

The national allotment federation's own history page. It sorts the nineteenth-century origins into six lines — poor gardens, factory gardens, Red Cross workers' gardens, the Berlin arbour colonists, gardens of the natural-healing movement and the Schreber gardens — and states that these lacked state legitimation and legal rules, with the absence of termination protection and the head-tenant system (Generalpächtersystem) in particular obstructing lasting protection. It records the passage of the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung by the National Assembly in Weimar on 31 July 1919, which banned commercial head-leasing and required rents to be fixed; the 1909 founding of the central federation; the Reich government's 1916 establishment of a central office for vegetable growing in allotments; the founding of the Reich federation of German allotment associations on 14 August 1921 at the second Reich allotment congress in Bremen; the Nazi-era Gleichschaltung; the post-war split into the VDK (Bochum, 1949) in the West and the VKSK (Leipzig, 1959) in the East; the 1973 renaming to BDG; and the renaming to BKD on 9 September 2023.

Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin · Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin (berlin.de) · Germany

An exhibition text in which Berlin's Pankow district office traces the history of allotment sites in the district. It describes the spread of Red Cross workers' gardens in the early twentieth century and their consolidation in 1906 into the Verband deutscher Arbeitergärten vom Roten Kreuz under Alwin Bielefeldt (1857–1942); the head-tenant (Generalpächter) system common around the turn of the century, in which land was leased and sublet with contracts often running for a single year; and the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung of 31 July 1919, which gave legal protection and prohibited head-leasing. On the arbour colonists it records the first permanent municipal lease in Blankenburg on former sewage fields in 1910 and the 1911 formation of a unified federation of arbour colonists of Berlin and surroundings, and cites a 1912 survey finding that 70 per cent of Berlin schoolchildren had never seen a sunrise and 54 per cent no sunset. For the GDR period it notes the founding of the VKSK in 1959, more than a million members by 1988 and its dissolution on 27 October 1990; more recently, that of Berlin's 900 allotment sites roughly 600 were given permanent protection and about 160 only time-limited protection.

Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission · Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission · Germany

The German UNESCO Commission's page on the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, inscribed as World Heritage in 2008. It lists the component estates: Gartenstadt Falkenberg (built 1913–1916), Siedlung Schillerpark (1924–1930), the Großsiedlung Britz or Horseshoe Estate (1925–1930), Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf (1926–1932), Wohnstadt Carl Legien (1928–1930), Weiße Stadt (1929–1931) and Großsiedlung Siemensstadt (1929–1934). Alongside the 2008 inscription it records that the Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf was added in July 2026; that estate has more than 1,900 dwelling units on 70 hectares. The architects named are Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolf Salvisberg.

Landesdenkmalamt Berlin · Landesdenkmalamt Berlin (berlin.de) · Germany

A short notice issued by the Berlin State Heritage Office on 27 July 2026. It reports that on 26 July 2026 the 48th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting in Busan, South Korea, inscribed the Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf as the seventh component of the World Heritage site 'Berlin Modernism Housing Estates'. The estate was built between 1926 and 1932 by the housing cooperative GEHAG and comprises 1,917 dwellings — 1,108 in multi-storey blocks and 809 single-family houses. The architects were Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolph Salvisberg, with the open spaces designed by Leberecht Migge and Martha Willings-Göhre. It lies around the U-Bahn station Onkel Toms Hütte on line U3 and along Argentinische Allee in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district. The nomination process began in 2021.

Berliner Forum für Geschichte und Gegenwart e.V. · Welterbe Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne (Berliner Forum für Geschichte und Gegenwart e.V.) · Germany

The page on the Britz Horseshoe Estate from the official site for the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage property. Construction ran from 1925 to 1931, with Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner responsible for the overall plan and urban design and Leberecht Migge and Ottokar Wagler for the garden design. The estate comprises 1,963 dwellings — 679 single-family rowhouses and 1,284 flats — ranging from 1.5 to 5 rooms. The World Heritage property covers 37.1 hectares with a 73.1-hectare buffer zone, and the emblematic horseshoe-shaped main block is 350 metres long. It was inscribed as World Heritage in 2008 and designated a garden monument in 2010.