Germans and their gardens

I was probably spoilt when I was growing up, my parents put a lot of effort in to their garden and received a lot of praise from friends, neighbours and strangers alike. (Me and my friends spent many warm summer evenings sitting on the lawn smoking doobies and admiring the Narcisse des près), but when ever I see the garden of the average German I am amazed by how visually handicapped they are, their creative limits generally seem limited to putting a garden gnome next to a muddy puddle and/or planting a random geranium.
The prevailing attitude here towards flora is just to let it grow, and grow, and grow. (I am basing this rant on my life in northern Germany. I suppose it might be different in the south), but now that summer is upon us Berlin is starting to look like the jungles of the Mekong Delta.

Do you have balls?

You should have come on the walk with me last Sunday. We went through an area near D'dorf that had some very impressive gardens.

I think it may have something to do with Berlin. I have family in Steglitz and often go for walks in Dahlem. Over there... it's more... Green party style. You know... the natural look. Nature as nature intended.

You'll have to try other towns.

@ chocky - awww, I LOVE the nice wild way Berliners plant their gardens! OK, I mean, untended is just untended and there's nothing attractive about that, but when they're sort of slapped together any which way, without paying attention to lawn edges and levels and blah blah blah and pruned only for the sake of the health of the plant, I think it looks quite nice. With all this concrete around, I find a bit of a jungle atmosphere quite refreshing

Oh yes, the famous graffiti gardens of Berlin ...
Several prospective tenants who viewed my townhouse last year wrinkled their noses at the garden as *gasp* you could see it from the footpath due to the fact that I refused to grow a hedge two meters high and half a meter thick. Instead I had sunflowers alongside of sweetpeas climbing a trellis. I miss my garden.

Watch out, or GerryM will swoop in and tell you you're full of "pish".

Seriously, we just made that observation last evening. The town I live in just redid an old english garden across the fields from our place, and they did such a crappy job on the topiary and formal beds that the original planner's probably spinning in his grave. It looks like a bad experiment with whisky and gorillas ... no color anywhere; as if they just shredded up astroturf and scattered it around.

Home gardeners appear to install so many trellises, gazebos, gazing balls, rock paths, tiles, doric columns, cherubs, birdbaths, granite balls that rotate on a column of water, park benches, recreations of the Battle of the Bulge using garden gnomes, etc. that there's no time, money or space left for any living plants. Lots of people in the neighborhood I live in have garden firms come in every year and just re-sod everything and stick in a few plants ... all of which unsurprisingly die because these "trusted experts" engineer in plenty of planned obsolescence to ring the cash register every year. Our theory: Lots of lifelong apartment dwellers whose only experience was as serial killers of Ikea ficus trees.

My wife's garden is off the charts this year ... and has steadily improved since we installed a UK satellite dish and she can watch all the excellent gardening shows for even more tips and tricks.

My neighbors have very nice gardens...wait most of them are either italian, russian or turkish..

My husband is a fan of lawn gnomes..lawd ha'mercy..

aw, expaticus' wife's garden is lovely. very pretty, relaxing to the eye, i like it.

I find it depressing, it's a constant reminder of how nobody gives a shit about anything in this city.
(I was sitting outside a cafe on Wiener Strasse yesterday and a whole branch fell off a tree a few yards in front of me, there wasn't a breath of wind in the air. Quite lucky no-one was hit by it really, it would have easily been big enough to knock me out, and I ain't exactly small.

As is quite often the case on here you folks make massive generalisations. You start a thread about Germans and their gardens but what you're really talking about is Berlin. Berlin isn't a template for Germany. I live in a small village in Bavaria and most people keep their gardens looking nice. But of course you don't want to hear that, you prefer just to slag people off.

I go walking around my neighbourhood alot, and I do see alot of boring or extremely plain gardens,
I live in a highrise, and this year planted pink and purple flowers nice a bright and sunny for me, it was mentioned to me in the laundry room, oh, you are the one with the colourful balcony... I am thinking, EH?
sorry its not a dead pine/coniferious or red geraniums!

But I do think people in smaller towns do have nice gardens, I was recently out for a run in Ismaning and there were some really really nice gardens, and some were very fragnant with roses.

Then he is clearly a top bloke. Gnomes are bloody great. I once saw a news report about some person or other who had a gnome nicked from their garden, They started getting photos of it in the mail, from different locations round the globe; somebody had stolen it, and taken it on a world tour and was sending photos back to the owner. Brilliant stuff. I might nick a local gnome next weekend, and take it out on the piss in Munich, and see how many photos I can get of him posing with tasty ladies, then return the gnome the next day with a little photo album.

My in-laws are responsible for the garden, which is a BIG relief to me - they are such perfectionists that if a plant doesn´t grow straight, they just pull it up and replace it (poor thing!)

Yes, my comments are based partly on Berlin, but I have traveled quite a lot around Germany, quite likely more than most of the expats here, and based on what I have seen in different parts, generally, Germans do not bother much with looking after their gardens.
Do you require empirical evidence to tell you that generally shit stinks?

I really don't get people who get so worked up about observations about this country that we live in - I don't think this thread was to mock or put down Germans for being cave men with no sophistication, just a comment about some of the gardens which happened to catch their eye.

I suppose if one passes a normal, well kept garden one doesn't notice it and then post about it on TT.

I haven't seen anything bad yet, in fact the gardens I saw in a suburb of Hamburg were quite lovely.

Don't the British have a kind of garden that is grown to look wild? A meadow garden or something? Maybe that's the look they're going for?

And agreed, Expaticus, you're lucky to have such a beautiful garden to gaze over