Pollinator Pathmaker Brings Algorithmic Gardens to Every Berlin District
The Berlin edition of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, has reached its goal of a small garden in every district of the German capital, with 21 editions now planted across the city.
An artwork designed for other species rather than for human viewers has quietly spread across Berlin. Pollinator Pathmaker, the algorithmic planting project by British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, has now reached its goal of placing a small edition in every one of the city's districts. Twenty DIY editions are planted across Berlin, alongside the large commission in front of the Museum für Naturkunde, bringing the total to 21.
The project first appeared in the German capital in June 2023, when LAS Art Foundation, working with the Natural History Museum, planted a plot in the museum's forecourt. Filled with asters, foliage and insects, the garden is not arranged for human taste. An algorithm generates planting compositions that prioritise the needs of pollinating insects, drawing on a palette of local plants selected with pollinator and horticultural experts for the region.
Ginsberg has described the work as beginning with a simple question: what happens when we create an artwork for other species rather than ourselves? The question is echoed on the project's website, which invites visitors to design their own garden plot by entering their location and other details. The resulting compositions are called editions rather than gardens, a distinction the artist insists on.
«They appear as a garden,» said LAS Art Foundation curator Sophie Korschildgen, who was instrumental in bringing the project to Berlin, «but Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is really consistent about calling them editions and artworks because she wants to take this assumption of value that we have when we speak about art — that it's something to be preserved, that it speaks for our culture, all of these things — and apply it to nature.»
The Berlin version required adaptation. LAS Art Foundation, a nomadic organisation that stages presentations at sites including Kraftwerk in Berlin and the Ateneo Veneto in Venice, was the project's first international commissioner and partner, joining before the original commission was planted at the Eden Project in Cornwall. For Berlin, the plant selection was adjusted to the continental biogeographic region, because Britain and Germany differ in climate and flora.
The collaboration grew out of a research strand at LAS focused on interspecies futures, set up with the Natural History Museum and other partners. Korschildgen describes it as a multi-year inquiry into human-nature relationships conducted through technology, asking how planetary computational technology can be developed to benefit the natural world rather than extract from it. In that sense, she said, Pollinator Pathmaker was a beautiful fit: a global series of gardens designed by an algorithm — not an AI, she stresses — to benefit pollinating insects, with the human role recast as caretaker of the ecosystem.
Since its inception, the project has developed into what Ginsberg calls a long-term, distributed living artwork, with planting compositions realised across Europe and commissioned works in the United States. The plots have been planted by museums, community groups, schoolchildren and members of the public, and the project has expanded into print, tapestry and video works. A large-scale plot has also been installed at the Serpentine in London.
In Berlin, the editions have bloomed each year since 2023, attracting wild bees and other pollinators back to the region. The spread to every district turns a single museum commission into a citywide network of small habitats, each one shaped by the same logic: the garden exists first for the insects, and only second for the people who pass by.
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