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FALLEN LEAVES AND PERSIAN CARPETS

My daily “walk in the park” takes me through an urban landscape that yields just beyond the elevated U-2 metro railway tracks to an award-winning, 64-acre green space known as Park am Gleisdreieck. 

The name belies the park’s origins:  a Gleisdreieck is a triangle-shaped connection of tracks consisting of three switches and three rails, which enables a train to directly transition or turn from one direction to another without a turntable or similar equipment.  Park am Gleisdrieck was realized between 2011-2014 from the massive, overgrown rail yard junction that served freight traffic originating south of Berlin before WWII.  During the war, the tracks and related facilities were heavily damaged and eventually abandoned.  Nature was the first to reclaim its space.  A team of landscape architects, citizens, and Berlin politicians came later.

 

To be in Park am Gleisdrieck is to feel alive.  The park is animated by three overhead metro rail lines (the U-1, -2, and -3) and regional and long-distance passenger train lines that connect to the main railway station nearby, the Hauptbahnhof.   The train traffic makes for a uniquely kinetic backdrop for the park’s other animators--the skateboarders, graffiti artists, joggers, table tennis players, picnickers, little kids racing over artificial hills on their scooters or bouncing around on trampolines, body builders, people cycling to and from work, teens playing pick-up basketball, young parents pushing strollers, and walkers like me.

 

Much more than just recreation and relaxation areas, the park also offers a craft brewery (seen below in summer, but now closed due to Corona), a railway museum, a community rose garden with vegetable plots, a café/gallery/urban ideation lab (your guess is as good as mine), expansive lawns for playing chess or doing cartwheels, benches for reading, and tiered seating areas where people can meet up or be alone without being isolated.

Along the maze of walkways in the park, the landscape architects introduced plantings and sited them among the type of rock used in track beds to create an off-hand, almost spontaneous meadow or prairie in the middle of an intensely urban context.  While “volunteers” are encouraged, there are also deliberate plantings.  Along the path I often take, for example, are lilacs that bloom in the Spring and buddleia that bloom in the Fall, as well as ornamental grasses and trees that change colors seasonally.


But best of all, the park takes me through a comeback-kid wood full of birches, oaks, maples, lindens, blackberries, and dog roses.  This is a place where Nature healed what man once destroyed.  Here I see railroad tracks that lead nowhere, rusted signals that guide no one, and weathering railroad ties that are composting into the forest floor.  It’s ghostly beautiful in all seasons, but particularly in the Fall.

Today, as the daylight waned, I passed by a stand of trees that had already lost most of their leaves.  To the right of my path, the fallen lay in a golden carpet that subtly changed its forward roll of color from a subdued golden hue, through dun, and on to brilliant yellow.  


My photo doesn't do it justice, but the subtle color changes from yellow to brown and back to yellow again were almost imperceptible when viewed up close, but dramatic when seen in their entirety, rendering the old saw visual: “You can’t see the forest for the trees.”

The morphing of colors in the woodland carpet at my feet reminded me of the abrash effect in antique hand-knotted Persian carpets, a variation in color that often results from vegetable dyes, differences in dye lots, and hand-spun wool used in the rug making process. Rug Blog  The variations are almost inevitable in rugs made before the introduction of chemical dyes and machine-spun wool in the 19th c.  To me, the abrash effect of the knots gives movement and complexity to the underlying warp and weft of the carpet, much as the fallen leaves gave movement and complexity to the underlying rail yards of Park am Gleisdrieck.


Fallen leaves and Persian carpets, poetic associations prompted by my walk in Gleisdreieck Park.  It's been my refuge during the plague, and where I go to restore my sanity and open my heart to the beauty all around me.  Beauty.  Find it where you can.  We're going to need it.

Keep it real!  Don’t forget to vote, and wear your damn mask!

Marilyn


 

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