— […] One day I was quietly filming a configuration of plants that had grown through a broken window in one of the crushed buildings. Someone had given me some hashish, which I had been smoking. I became transfixed by the quality of light in the shattered window, which evoked an image from Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Suddenly a tiny woman jumped out of the bushes. I just about had a heart attack! “Mein Gott!” I said. “Was machts du?” “Und Sie?” she responded. “I’m looking for history,” I said. My German was terrible. Realizing I was not a native speaker, the woman answered in English: “I’m a botanist and I’m collecting plants.” I was a bit stunned. I wanted to make a portrait of her, but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She went on to explain that in this particular area of Berlin there were more species of plants than anywhere else in Europe. “Why is that?” I asked, still not sure if I was talking to a real person or a hallucination. She explained that trains came to Berlin from across Europe, carrying on their surfaces hundreds of seeds and spores. Upon arriving in Berlin the trains were washed. The seeds then germinated, and many species of plants that had not been indigenous to Berlin began to grow. Because the train station was almost completely destroyed during the war and had remained virtually untouched for 40 years, the plants continued to proliferate. ”This is my laboratory,” she said, surveying the ruins. I was dumbfounded and feeling a bit uneasy. I thanked her, picked up my camera and wandered off. The woman disappeared into the bushes.
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