W olfram Kircher is Professor of Plant Ecology in the Department of Agriculture, Ecotrophology and Landscape Development at Hochschule Anhalt in Bernburg. His research has long concerned itself with how perennial communities behave on different substrates and irrigation regimes — and with the planting design of natural swimming pools, where moorland plants do, slowly, the work that chlorine does briskly and badly.
His Bernburger Staudenmix trials helped establish a German tradition of pre-designed, ecologically grouped perennial mixtures now used widely in public planting, and his substrate research has extended that work toward planting schemes resilient to a warming climate. The experimental and demonstration grounds at the Strenzfeld campus, open to the public, are the laboratory in which most of it is worked out.
With Andreas Thon he co-authored How to Build a Natural Swimming Pool — the practical English-language reference on a subject that, on the continent, has long since stopped being fringe.
