A tree outside your front door: planting the tree pit in your neighbourhood – guide

Editorial team·updated on 15 Sep 2026

Deadlines, funding rates, responsible offices, projects and events in this guide come live from our records. They are not written into the text and are not maintained twice.

There is a lime tree outside your building, and around its trunk lies a patch of bare soil: the tree pit. In summer it is as hard as concrete, the rest of the year it collects dog mess and cigarette ends. You want to plant something there. In Berlin you can – but not in the same way in every Bezirk (district), and not with every plant.

Your starting point

The ground is not yours. A tree pit in the pavement is public street land, and the Straßen- und Grünflächenamt (street and green space office) of your Bezirk is responsible for it. Whether you rent or own makes no difference: even as an owner you have no gardening rights on the pavement in front of your house.

Three things decide what is possible. Size: most Berlin tree pits are between two and six square metres. Light: what grows under a dense lime tree in a narrow side street is not what grows on an open south-facing street. The tree: the pit is how it gets water and air. The tree comes first, your plants come second – turn that around and you harm the tree and lose the permission again.

Is this realistic?

What is realistic is a low planting of drought-tolerant perennials, watered two or three times a week in summer. What is not realistic: shrubs, woody plants, climbers, thorny species and vegetables. Shrubs take the tree's water and block sightlines, climbers grow into the crown, and vegetables from an inner-city street bed are better not eaten.

Young trees are the delicate case. Several Bezirke require the tree to have stood in place for at least five years before a sponsorship is possible – a newly planted tree needs its pit undivided. You do not need professional planning; you need an honest estimate of whether you will really do the watering. If there are already planted pits in your neighbourhood, go and look at them first:

Step by step

1. Find out your Bezirk's rule Find out how your Bezirk handles this before you buy any plants. The rules are not uniform across Berlin: planting height, permitted digging depth, edging and the registration route differ from office to office.
2. Register or apply for permission Register the tree pit – in some Bezirke through an online form, in others by email giving street, house number and, if possible, the tree number, in others again as a written sponsorship agreement. Stopping point: where a permit is required, do not start before you have it. Unauthorised planting on street land is an unpermitted special use and can be removed at your expense.
3. Look at the tree Is the root flare, the transition from trunk to roots, clear? Are thick roots running just under the surface? Is the soil compacted because cars parked or material was stored there? What you see decides how much of the area you can plant at all.
4. Loosen the soil carefully By hand only, not with a spade and never with machines. The Bezirke give digging depths of roughly ten to twenty centimetres as the upper limit and about thirty centimetres distance from the trunk. Stopping point: if you hit a root thicker than a finger, stop at that spot and plant beside it.
5. Plant low and drought-tolerant Use regionally native, insect-friendly perennials that cope with heat and drought and stay low – the Bezirke set height limits of roughly fifty to seventy centimetres. Fertiliser, peat and salt have no place in a tree pit. A thin layer of mulch holds moisture better than any watering can.
6. Agree the watering, don't just do it Knock on two or three neighbours' doors and settle who waters in July and August, and who covers the holidays. A tree pit almost never fails at the planting stage; it fails on the third hot weekend with nobody in charge.
7. Water the tree as well Your perennials need a few litres, the tree needs many. Water slowly and deeply so it does not simply run off the surface – trees between five and fifteen years old in particular depend on help through a Berlin summer.

Time and cost

Time: registering and clarifying takes you half an hour plus the office's waiting time, the planting itself one afternoon. Reckon on one day in total.

Cost: as an order of magnitude for a pit of two to six square metres done yourself: roughly 20 to 80 euros for perennials, a little soil and a watering can. That is an editorial estimate, not a quotation – buying potted wild perennials instead of seed takes you above it quickly. Second-hand watering cans and divided plants from neighbours' gardens bring it well down.

Upkeep: the real work is water. From May to September water two or three times a week, cut back in spring, and pick out litter and dog mess in between. Over a season that easily adds up to twenty or thirty hours – split between three households it is a trifle, alone it is a commitment.

Follow-up costs: replanting in the second year, because some plants will not make it. Anyone who sets edging where it is allowed must also be able to remove it again.

What are you allowed to do?

Two sets of rules apply at once. The tree pit lies on public street land: anything beyond ordinary public use is a Sondernutzung (special use) under the Berliner Straßengesetz (Berlin roads act) and therefore needs permission. And the tree itself is protected – the Baumschutzverordnung (tree protection ordinance) protects broadleaved trees from a trunk circumference of eighty centimetres, measured at 1.30 metres height. What is protected is expressly not only the trunk but the root zone: the area under the crown plus 1.50 metres in all directions. Prohibited there are, among other things, sealing the surface, digging out and filling up, compacting the soil and applying salts, acids, oils and chemicals. Breaching this without an exemption is a regulatory offence.

The registration route is a district matter. According to the state information on gardening in public space, creating a tree bed without a separate permit is possible only in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Mitte and Neukölln, provided you keep to the applicable rules; in the other Bezirke you need prior agreement or permission from the Straßen- und Grünflächenamt. The details differ too: Mitte allows a low wooden picket edging up to forty centimetres, other Bezirke forbid any edging at all; permitted plant height ranges from fifty to seventy centimetres, digging depth from ten to twenty.

A case-by-case decision is normal. For very young trees, at junctions, at stops and at fire service access routes the office may refuse or reduce the area – there, traffic safety comes before greenery. Which rule applies to you and who interprets it is something the responsible office in your Bezirk will tell you; you will find it below under „Your next step“.

Matching funding

There is no grant programme in Berlin for a single tree pit – the sums are too small and an application procedure would cost more than it pays. What does exist is practical support: some Bezirke hand out planting material, leaflets or plant lists, neighbourhood initiatives lend tools, and individual Bezirke give away trees to sponsors. As soon as you plan more than one pit – a whole side of a street, a bed, an initiative with a registered association – funding becomes relevant.

Free advice on tree pits, courtyards and balconies is also offered by the open Sprechstunde Stadtbegrünung (urban greening advice session) run by GRÜNE LIGA Berlin. And if you would rather not start on your own: at a neighbourhood planting session you learn more in two hours than from any leaflet.

Your next step