Harmas KGV is a model plantation with twenty highly endangered native wild herbs. The area of Parzelle 3 (Plot 3), an outpost of the Kunsthaus Dresden, has a stone fill with local sand-limestone that rises up toward the centre. In the centre of the site is an event area with a pavilion designed by Constructlab. Concrete scraps accumulated in Flora 1 were used to construct a dry stone wall.
Collaboration partners: Botanical Garden of TU Dresden (outpost Boselgarten), Environmental Agency of the State Capital Dresden, Kleingärtnerverein Flora I e.V., ARTENREICH Naturnahe Gartengestaltung Sabine Kroehs, Mittwochsmaler (painting group of the allotment gardens Leubnitzer Höhe), Garten- und Landschaftsbau GalaBau, Umweltzentrum Dresden e.V., Dresdner Gartenfreunde e.V., Constructlab

Harmas
Jean-Henri Fabre, the famous French entomologist of the late 19th century, a pioneer of behavioural research who corresponded with Charles Darwin, among others, writes in the chronicle of his life’s work “Souvenirs Entomologiques” (Memoirs of an Entomologist), which he published between 1879 and 1907: “I would like to speak of the piece of land which, according to my long-cherished plan, is to become a laboratory for living entomology, of the piece of land which I have now finally obtained in the solitude of a small village. It is a ‘harmas’. That’s what they call stony fallow land, overgrown with thyme here.” With the Harmas, Fabre realized his dream in 1879 of creating an insect paradise where he could observe insect behaviour undisturbed and without having to walk long distances. Today, Harmas de Fabre is open to the public as part of the French National Natural History Museum.
Fabre’s remarkable attitude towards even the smallest of his fellow animal and plant creatures becomes clear in a paragraph of his writings addressed to his colleagues in laboratory science: “And then, my beloved insects: if you cannot convince these good people because you do not have the needed force of boredom, then I tell them: you slash the animal, I study it alive; you make of it an object of disgust and pity, I make it lovable; you work in a workshop where torture and dismemberment take place, I watch under a blue sky as the cicadas sing; you treat cell and protoplasm with chemicals, I study instinct in its most sublime forms; you study death, I study life.” In Fabre’s time, there was still plenty of intact nature in the countryside – the cities, on the other hand, offered comparatively little chance for plants and animals to develop.
Today, this situation has almost been reversed: due to land consolidation, widespread monoculture and the use of pesticides, the habitat for many animals and plants in the countryside is becoming smaller and green cities have become refuges. Allotment garden culture also has a considerable share in this. From an ecological point of view, allotment gardens, like botanical gardens, function as remaining sanctuaries of biodiversity.
The Harmas KGV project in plot 3 of the KGV Flora I e.V. aims to use and promote this potential of allotment gardens through the creation and joint care of an arid biotope with native flora and to counteract the loss of species knowledge. It opens up a place where we can observe our “fellow animal and plant creatures” in Fabre’s sense, “with loving enthusiasm and a thirst for knowledge”.

Substrate
Pläner sandstone or gaize, a calcareous sandstone sediment from the Cretaceous period, is found in deeper geological layers in the urban area of Dresden. The substrate on which the Flora I e.V. allotment garden site is located is made up of approximately the following structure: a layer of two to three metres of sandy clay followed by a layer of four to five metres of Elbe gravel. Immediately below this is the groundwater; from a depth of 18 metres, the relics of a Cretaceous sea can be found that covered the whole of Europe 90 to 100 million years ago. The Pläner layer in the Dresden urban area can be up to 18 metres thick. While preparing the fill at Harmas KGV, a fossil was found – reflecting how the calcareous components of the rock were formed by the deposition of skeletons of cretaceous creatures. Former quarries on the southern edge of Dresden bear witness to the fact that Pläner sandstone was extracted as building material. The Pläner used for the project derives from the Erlweinscher Amtsschlachthof (part of the official slaughterhouse built in 1908), when parts of the stables were demolished in 2018. Today, a Dynamo Dresden performance sports centre is located on the site. Harald Wolf, an employee of the Dresden environmental authority, secured the material in order to use it for ecological enhancement measures such as the construction of lizard habitats. The building rubble was enriched with a clay-sand mixture to provide ideal living conditions for the plants, which are adapted to extreme warmth, dryness and low nutrients. The PH value of the substrate is between 6 and 7.5.