The article considers various aspects of constructing and applying the concept of urban ecological framework, and also practices of direct interaction. The environmental discourse assumes a more reflexive attitude towards the flora and fauna representatives, regarding them as full social structure subjects. Taking into account high rates of urbanization, it tends to be more topical to analyze human interaction with the plants within the urban space. In the scope of this paper, we reviewed

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... tical approaches to the conceptualization of the concepts related to urban vegetation, highlighting the concept of city ecological framework as the most optimally corresponding to the New Ecological Paradigm. Further, the author analyzed the urban planning documents of 15 Russian million cities where the city garden problems are reviewed at various reflective levels. Besides, the work presents the results of an experiment on the environmental audit of urban areas, when participants analyzed the structure of urban ecological framework and its separate elements. The experiment showed a low level of the participants ecological culture, because the identification of specific plant species caused serious difficulties, and the scenarios of personal interaction with plants were rather poor and were limited to passive perception. However, the informing orientation of the experiment encouraged the participants to self-reflect, that raised the participants awareness about the structure and functions of the ecological framework and expanded personal strategies for interacting with it.