Sensory Garden

THE SITE

The Sensory Garden is one part of a larger scheme called The Urban Green Retreat, on Zepziger Weg in Bernburg. The city is losing inhabitants. Buildings have come down and not been replaced, and it is shrinking around the gaps they left.

The scheme treats those gaps as the site rather than as land waiting for the next building. What it sets out to rebuild is the identity of the place, and the argument is that the identity sits in the ground between the buildings rather than in replacing what came down. A city losing people needs a reason to stay before it needs more floorspace. The garden is one of the middle phases and can be read as a pilot for the rest.

Four things were set as tests: biodiversity, adaptation to a changing climate, ecological and social durability, and cost. The last is not a footnote. A municipality with fewer inhabitants each year has less to spend each year, so anything that cannot be built cheaply and kept cheaply is not a proposal, it is a drawing.

THE GARDEN

The paths loop rather than run straight, and they are laid semi-permeable, so what falls on them goes into the ground instead of into a drain. Against a cost test that is the cheapest drainage available: no gully, no pipe, nothing anyone has to come and clear.

A public garden fails when it offers only one way to be in it. This one offers several. Open lawn where children can run and a parent can watch from a distance. Benches along the paths for people stopping briefly. Woven pods set back from the route, for anyone who wants to sit out of the way without going indoors. The seating is deliberately various because the people are.

Large trees carry the shade, which in a garden meant to be used through a warming summer is not decoration. The beds run through the whole garden rather than sitting at its edges, and they are perennial: planting paid for once that comes back, rather than bedding a municipality with less to spend each year has to buy again. The hedge closes the boundary only where it needs closing, not all the way round.

Every species in the garden was chosen against the biodiversity test, the perennial mix included. The list was settled by what the planting feeds and shelters as much as by how it reads.

WHAT TO NOTICE

The pods are woven, not clad. You can see out of one, and other people can see in. A solid shelter in a public garden has a blind interior, and a blind interior is a thing that gets avoided or misused; the weave gives somebody a place to sit apart from the path without putting them anywhere nobody can see.

WHERE THIS STOPS BEING TRUE

Permeable paving stops being permeable. Silt and leaf litter fill the voids, and unless somebody brushes it out every few years the surface becomes ordinary paving with a drainage argument attached to it. That is the catch in the cheapest option: cheap to build still needs someone to turn up.

The larger risk is the premise. This is social space built for a place that is losing the people who would use it, and it is one phase of a scheme a shrinking municipality may never finish. If the later phases do not come, the garden is not a link in anything — it is a good park in a thinning neighbourhood. A garden alone does not reverse a demographic trend, and it would be worth nothing to pretend otherwise. What it can do is give the people still there a reason to be outside, which is a smaller claim and the only one worth making.