Egerer and colleagues treat community gardens as real-world laboratories in which ecological knowledge is produced through intervention rather than observation alone. Working with gardeners and neighbourhood residents in Berlin and Munich, the research co-develops biodiversity practices aimed at insect conservation and explores how successful strategies might travel beyond individual gardens into wider urban ecosystems. The garden becomes simultaneously habitat, social infrastructure, experiment and pedagogical platform. Its transdisciplinary method connects civil society, scientists and municipal actors, refusing the separation between ecological expertise and everyday stewardship. The paper’s wider contribution is scalar: knowledge generated in small cultivated plots becomes potentially transferable to neighbourhood and city systems. It bridges urban ecology with education, civic participation and living-lab methodologies, demonstrating that ecological transformation can be organised through situated learning networks rather than exclusively through top-down planning.