Discover the tough plants that flourish in walls, pavements and wastelands in this fascinating new book

it is very rare that you get to say this, but this book is everything I wanted it to be, and is much more than a traditional guide to identifying plants. Written by the accomplished botanist, Trevor Dines (one of the
initiators of No Mow May, a national campaign by conservation charity Plantlife to encourage gardeners to mow less and let wildflowers thrive), it is part of a collection of British wildlife guides that is both ambitious and growing.

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This is number 15 in the series and it is wonderful to see a publisher committed to such insightful and learned books. All that erudition aside, what makes this book so wonderful is the writing, which sings from page one. It is a hymn to the cracks in the pavements, of loose mortar and porous surfaces, and the poetry they provide: buddleja is a ‘quintessential conqueror of concrete’.

It skips effortlessly from the gentle observations of a flâneur (a new discovery on the way to the hairdresser, perhaps) to well-researched facts: for example, 51 per cent of the British flora now comprises species from other countries. Urban habitats cover around five million acres in the UK, so there is a lot to explore.

To peer back in time is to remind ourselves that we have always been moving and managing
our landscapes

This book isn’t so much a plant identification guide, for as Dines rightly points out the internet is a faster tool for that and Floras are more reliable sources of botanical information. Instead, it is a guide to understanding these unusual, often recombinant habitats, why they exist, how to define and understand them, and accept their fluctuating, sometimes fleeting, nature.

The book is divided into four parts. The first is a brief history of urban plants. We learn that the first formal observation of urban nature appeared in William Turner’s The Names of Herbes in 1548, but that urban botany is far, far older than that. Thus, we know that the Romans and other inhabitants of Calleva (now Silchester) ate well: celery, dill, fennel, coriander and the remains of olives have all been found at the bottom of wells dating back to between 10 BCE and 80 CE.

To peer back in time is to remind ourselves that we have always been moving and managing our landscapes, so that towns and cities are ‘in a constant state of flux, a dynamic pattern of growth, innovation, declines, redevelopment and renewal’.

It is a guide to understanding these unusual, often recombinant habitats, why they exist, how to define and understand them, and accept their fluctuating, sometimes fleeting, nature.

The second section, on the roots of urban botany, looks at how plants ended up in towns, either from encapsulated countryside (the locked-in parts of a once rural landscape); through novel habitats created by urbanisation (walls acting like lime-rich rock outcrops, for example); or through the spread of incomers, escaping from gardens or arriving on mass transport.

We also learn about the influence of the physical environment on their survival, be that materials, water sources, nutrients, pollution or the urban heat effect (which is how we have loquats and avocados as part of a London jungle).

The book then moves to a practical, habitat-by-habitat guide: pavements, walls, urban fallow (wasteland), waysides (the grassy bits) and, in case you’re fooled into spending too long looking at your feet, urban trees.

The final section explores where urban botany and even plants are heading next, delving into the politics of urban wildflower meadows versus grassland meadows, dog-pee zones (to discourage male dogs from repeatedly marking trees), and pavement heave from tree roots, which too often results in trees being removed because of the trip hazards they create.

A poetic and learned illustrated guide to the ecology underpinning urban flora, this is a deeply researched work that is relevant to academics and amateurs alike.

Reviewer Alys Fowler writes about plants in all their guises. Her latest book is Peatlands (Hodder Press, £20).