THE DISCIPLINE OF ATTENTION

"I am careful not to romanticise observation," Anna Lena explains. "Seeing without acting leaves us unable to respond to the urgent questions of climate adaptation, biodiversity loss or urban heat. Acting without seeing produces generic solutions."

Practice, she says, is the continual movement between observation and intervention.

Growing up in Germany's Ruhr region taught her that disturbance is never simply destruction. Industrialisation profoundly altered these landscapes, yet many also became places of remarkable ecological renewal. Those experiences challenged the idea that nature exists separately from people.

"We live in landscapes shaped by generations of human activity," she says. "I am interested in understanding how people and ecological processes can continue shaping places together."

That way of thinking extends to curiosity itself.

"Curiosity is less a personality trait than a discipline of attention."

Influenced by anthropologist Tim Ingold's writing on craft, Anna Lena describes expertise as something developed through careful engagement rather than the application of fixed knowledge. Every site carries its own soils, climate, maintenance culture, social history and ecological dynamics. Learning to recognise those differences is what prevents landscapes from becoming generic.

One project in particular transformed how she understood her own practice.

Commissioned to convert a grey concrete rooftop at a middle school in Paris into a garden, the brief initially seemed straightforward. The school wanted greenery, but with very little maintenance. Rather than focusing solely on the planting, Anna Lena involved pupils and school technicians throughout the design and establishment of the garden.

Years later, those relationships continue to sustain the project. The technicians care for the planting with genuine commitment, while students use it as a place for learning.

That experience led to a simple but profound realisation.

"If we didn't cultivate relationships between the plants and the people, the design would ultimately fail."

Successful planting design, she realised, is as much about cultivating relationships as arranging plants.

This way of practising also requires becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

"Every design is a speculative gesture," Anna Lena says.

No planting plan unfolds exactly as imagined. Weather changes, species surprise us and landscapes continue evolving long after construction is complete. Rather than designing fixed outcomes, she advocates designing adaptive processes that can respond to change over time.

Mentors such as Bettina Jaugstetter and Cassian Schmidt reinforced this thinking, teaching her to read plants as indicators of broader ecological processes and to design with redundancy, creating plant communities where several species perform similar ecological roles, allowing landscapes to remain resilient even when individual plants fail.

"It is a wonderfully humble way of designing," she reflects, "accepting uncertainty while preparing for it."