Liz Eve spent over a decade photographing buildings for Fotohaus, an architectural photography agency—capturing the structures that shape how we live, and quietly noticing what was missing from the frame.

The missing piece turned out to be a food forest. Café Botanico is a working permaculture garden hidden behind a residential building in Berlin’s Rixdorf district—not manicured, not obvious, easy to walk past. When Eve stumbled across it after completing a permaculture design course, she did what photographers do. She came back. And kept coming back for a full year, through every season, until she understood it well enough to make a book about it.

Botanico: A Year in the Food Forest is 252 pages of photography, stories, recipes, and permaculture methods. She crowdfunded the first edition, designed it during the pandemic, and has since watched it become a resource for the Café Botanico community itself—new staff use it to learn the plants. She’s also since completed an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation. The architecture career and the food forest book aren’t a pivot so much as a long zoom out: the same question, brought into sharper focus.

In this conversation, Liz talks about why a year was the only timeline that made sense, how permaculture principles shaped the design of the book itself, and why you should start your project well before you’re ready.

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Photography, permaculture, sustainable architecture, academic research—you do it all! Tell us more about who you are, how you got to where you are today, and what drives you.

I think the thread running through everything I do is a fascination with how people relate to living systems. I would add that I also have a longing to reconnect with and to share how nature nourishes and inspires.

My background is in architectural photography and sustainability communications. I worked with Fotohaus for a huge variety of people shaping our cities, and spent over 10 years writing about sustainable architecture and urban ecology for publications like Inhabitat. One of my favorite projects was supporting the Horizon 2020 Open Soil Atlas project, which grew out of the Feld Food Forest project on Tempelhofer Feld, and was a great experience of building community around the basics that sustain us.

I’ve always used the camera to process my inner and outer world and to slow down and really look at something. I felt lucky to discover permaculture as the framework that finally connected my interest in ecology, design, and social systems into one coherent philosophy.

Most recently, I completed an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation, with my dissertation focusing on what actually motivates owners of old buildings to take climate action. That research confirmed it’s the human and governance dimensions that determine whether change happens. That’s the space I find most captivating and urgent—and why I work in communications.

You spent a full year at Café Botanico. What made you want to document it, and what did that longer timeline reveal that a shorter project couldn’t have?

Café Botanico isn’t a typical café. It’s a food forest—a working permaculture system within a 1000m2 city plot. When I first encountered it, I knew it would take time to absorb and understand.

In permaculture, many designers say you should spend a year to fully understand a place before changing it. I wanted to understand the system, ecology, and community, not just photograph it. A food forest is designed to develop over decades—it mimics the succession patterns of a natural woodland, with different layers doing different work at different times. A shorter visit would have given me beautiful images of a moment. A year gave me seasons: the dying back, the unexpected abundance, the way the people who tend it relate differently to the place in winter or summer. I was lucky that Martin Höfft supported the project and was open to me turning up, getting involved, and documenting.

The longer timeline earned a bit more trust. People share a bit more with you when they know you’re not just passing through. I think in the best documentary settings, you have to be there long enough that people forget you’re watching.

When did you know this was going to be a book, and what did making something physical give you that a screen-based project couldn’t?

Part of it was the material I was working with. Permaculture is so tactile. It’s about soil, life, and the feel of a place. A screen-based project would have captured the images but not the texture—the sense that this is something you can hold, return to, fold back open at a page.

There’s also something about the permanence of print that felt right for a project rooted in long-term thinking. A food forest is an investment in time. A book honors that in a way a feed of images doesn’t.

It was also during the pandemic that designing the book gave me a challenge that kept me sane—how to sequence 252 pages so that the reader’s experience mirrors something of what it was like to be there. That constraint made me edit ruthlessly and think about rhythm and pacing in a way I wouldn’t have had to online.

The Botanico is 252 pages of photography, stories, recipes, and permaculture methods. What was your design process like on something this ambitious?

It was iterative and, at times, overwhelming. I called on my brother Tim and his partner, Victoria, both talented visual designers, for help, and they gave very useful feedback. The permaculture principles I’d been immersing myself in also informed the design process.

I started by sorting everything into layers, exactly how a food forest is arranged. There were the visual layers (wide landscape shots, close detail shots, portraits), the narrative layers (the history of the place, the people, the philosophy), and the practical layers (the recipes, the methods). I worked a lot in spreads rather than thinking page by page. The rhythm between image-heavy and text-heavy sections was something I kept adjusting right up to the final layout.

Permaculture is about working with natural systems rather than against them. How did you translate that philosophy into something a reader could actually pick up and use?

I tried to resist the temptation to over-explain. Permaculture can become very technical very quickly, and I wanted the book to be welcoming to someone who’s never encountered the concept, but substantive enough to satisfy someone who has.

What I kept coming back to is that permaculture is really a way of observing before acting. So the book tries to model that. The photography comes first—it asks you to look, really look, at how the system has been designed and what it’s doing. The stories give the social context.

I drew on thinkers like Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, original permaculture teachers, and discussed Brand and Wissen’s concept of the imperial mode of living and how it cuts us off from direct relationships with the land and with seasonal rhythms.

You crowdfunded the first edition. Why did you go that route, and what was that process like?

I used Startnext, which is the German-language equivalent of Kickstarter, because it had a strong list of creative and social projects. I wanted to test whether there was an audience before committing to a print run. Self-publishing a book of this scale—full-color, 252 pages—is a real financial commitment, and crowdfunding let me validate the project. It also meant the first readers were people who had actively chosen to be part of bringing it into existence, which felt right.

What has the response been like?

I have really enjoyed hearing people say the book made them want to plant something or try a different local herb. That’s what I hoped for: that it would function as a kind of invitation.

Some readers have simply said it’s a book they keep coming back to—not necessarily reading linearly, but picking up, opening somewhere, spending time with a photograph or a recipe. And when I have returned to Botanico, I hear that the new staff use it to learn about the plants and recipes, which sounds very nice!

It was fun when some papers and online media outlets picked up the story and let me wax lyrical about urban gardening.

What advice would you give someone who wants to get into architectural photography?

Learn to see light before you worry about equipment. The direction, the softness, the way it reveals or flattens a surface is the substance of making images. That understanding takes time to develop, and no camera accelerates it.

The best architectural images convey something about the designer’s intention. Spend time studying the buildings you want to photograph before you arrive with a camera. Understand what the architect was trying to do.

Work on your perspective and individual relationship to the subject. There’s a kind of anonymous perfection in a lot of architectural photography, where images are beautiful and technically accomplished but belong to no one. The photographs that stay with me have a point of view.

And what about to someone who wants to document a place or community they love but hasn’t started yet?

Start before you’re ready. The project you imagine before you begin is never the project you end up making, and the sooner you start accumulating material, the sooner you’ll discover what it actually wants to be.

Take notes alongside your photographs. Not just captions—impressions, questions, things you overheard. The written record will become invaluable later, both as a source of text and as a way of reconstructing your own relationship to the material.

Tell us what’s next for you!

I’m in the early stages of developing a project inspired by the values that Botanico embodies: slowness, connection to living systems, and the idea that urban environments can support genuine regeneration rather than just recovery. It’s still in the feasibility and planning stage, which means it’s full of open questions. Even if it stays in the theoretical realm, I feel compelled to work on it.

Alongside that, I’m continuing to work on communications for projects and organizations working in sustainability and the built environment. If you need someone who can translate research and ideas on regenerative design, climate adaptation, or the built environment into writing and visual communication, I’d be happy to hear from you.

If you are on Substack, the newsletters Liz Eve Adapts and Regenerative Futures are where I think out loud about all of this.

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How Botanico: A Year in the Food Forest was made

• Format: Paperback (Softcover)
• Size: 8×10 in, 20×25 cm
• Paper: Standard Color
• Design tool: BookWright by Blurb

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Blurb is the self-publishing platform that gives photographers, artists, and creators the tools to design, print, and share their work—no publisher, no gatekeepers. Whether you’re documenting a food forest or a lifetime of images, get started today.