Name: Learning from Nature – Habitat-Based Planting Concepts for Stressful Urban Green Spaces.
Start: 2025-11-18T16:30:00+01:00
Location: Institut for Geovidenskab Og Naturforvaltning

Public lecture by Prof. CASSIAN SCHMIDT
Location: Auditorium ’Von Langen’
The lecture and Q&A will be moderated by Associate Professor Mona Chor Bjørn.
Followed by a reception. All are welcome!
This Copenhagen Landscape Lecture is organised by the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning - Design in collaboration with the Goethe Institut Dänemark.
Contact: Anne Wagner ([email protected]), Ellen Braae ([email protected]) and Frida Søltoft ([email protected])

Learning from Nature – Habitat-Based Planting Concepts for Stressful Urban Green Spaces.
The use of perennials and small shrubs in urban green spaces offers a number of advantages in terms of resilience. To enhance visual appeal and ensure year-round attractiveness, it makes sense to supplement these with species from geographically related vegetation areas, particularly from the south-eastern European and sub-Mediterranean climate zones.
In his lecture, Prof. Cassian Schmidt will show new ways in which attractive and insect-friendly plant combinations can be established in public green spaces in times of climate change, primarily using Central European wild perennials, geophytes and small shrubs, and how the proportion of native species can be sensibly supplemented with closely related but often more attractive species from south-eastern Europe and even non-invasive species of the prairie regions of North America. This integrative approach offers a plant-friendly compromise, which the speaker has been testing for over 25 years in ecologically based plantings inspired by natural vegetation models in the Hermannshof display garden in Weinheim and beyond in real stressful urban green spaces and parks like in the city of Mannheim and the Westpark Augsburg. Conventional plantings are now reaching their limits in most stressful locations in urban contexts. In addition, construction methods, substrates, and maintenance strategies will have to be adapted to increasingly extreme conditions in the future.

Cassian Schmidt
Professor for planting design and plant use at Technical University Ostwestfalen-Lippe (TH OWL), Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Science at Höxter.
Cassian Schmidt, teaches as a professor for planting design and plant use at Technical University Ostwestfalen-Lippe (TH OWL), Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Science. From 2010 to 2024, he was a visiting professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture at Geisenheim University. Since 2004, he has been chairman of the “Working Committee for perennial plant use” of the German Perennial Plant Association (BdS). Additionally, he works as a planting designer and consultant in private and public projects, has worked as an author of articles and is an internationally renowned lecturer. For 25 years (1998 until 2023), he was the director of Hermannshof Garden, a privately-public owned and internationally renowned trial garden for habitat-based naturalistic perennial plantings at Weinheim in South-Western Germany. Schmidt’s long-term research at Hermannshof Garden has focused on the “New German Style” of planting, using stress-tolerant natural plant communities. He has been developing habitat-based low-maintenance perennial planting concepts and effective maintenance concepts based on ecological strategies.