Wild Urban Plants

Let us now praise infamous weeds.

“It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how”… it got that way. Well, as early as 1672, a couple dozen European plants were already growing spontaneously in New England…

Today, there are Paulownia trees growing on both ends of the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal. The Canal, a Superfund site running up into the soft underbelly of western Brooklyn, is surrounded by a largely de-industrialized zone of former warehouses and factories, industrial parking lots, and a buried fuel depot. So it’s a bit of a surprise to come across these blooming trees in spring, with their large, trumpet-shaped violet flowers. They seem spectacularly misplaced. But they aren’t.

Paulownia tormentosa — also known as the Princess Tree, the kiri, and the Empress Tree — is a native of East Asia. It was imported to the U.S. in the early 19th century. Though Asian, it was named in the West after Anna Pavlovna, one of the daughters of Russian Tsar Paul I. She, in that limited gene-pool Euro-royal way, became Queen consort of the Netherlands, and her name was transliterated into the Dutch: Anna Paulowna. She would be surprised to see her namesake tree rooted in the banks of a canal infamous for its heavy metals, rainbow surface, and — I’ve always suspected their existence, but have never been able to prove it –- mutant flipper babies. But then, the tree is a weed, an invasive: it’s a street fighter, indomitable, hardy, able to hack the toxic hell.

Peter Del Tredici of the Arnold Arboretum wants us to recognize the value of such trees and plants, which he calls “spontaneous urban vegetation.” He decries such value-laden terms as “weed” and “invasive,” which suggest that the plants themselves are to blame for industrial wastelands, empty lots, ruined streets, gutted houses, and, well, Detroit, when the plants are only doing what they do best. After all, we’re the ones who have created the disrupted environments in which these plants live, and sometimes even thrive. Del Tredici’s book Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast is a field guide to the ecological reality of the urban environment; his introduction is a good antidote to the impossible purity of — I think I’ll coin a phrase here, fairly cognizant of its implications — plant nativism, a notion I’ve been known to fall prey to myself. To a great extent, spontaneous vegetation is now the normal ecological condition of cities. Gardens, parks, and other landscaped areas, meanwhile, are only maintained by time, effort, and money (for how long, with the concept of public everything under ruthless assault?), while even more protection is required for those patches of remnant native habitat that survive.

Without in any way diminishing the importance of the cultivated and the protected, we should also understand that the 200-plus zero maintenance plants Del Tredici profiles, as well as others, provide food for wildlife; control erosion and stabilize banksides; build soil; reduce temperature; absorb carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous; tolerate pollution, and so on, all very much on the plus side of making the urban environment more livable. Some of these plants, after all, will grow where nothing else will. There are negatives, of course, and some of them are only getting worse: increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere looks like it’s making for more potent ragweed and poison ivy (may they torment & inflame the future-fucking Republicans). In addition, there are plants like kudzu and bittersweet that choke out everything else and make for a monoculture, which is rarely, if ever, good.

One of Del Tredici’s points is that cities, which are characteristically warmer than surrounding regions due to the heat island effect, are a forecast of the warmer future the rest of the planet will experience. We urbanites are already living in the future (but we know that). Our plants, our selves.

But wait, all is not smartweed and ailanthus. Del Tredici offers a guide to landscaping with s.u.v., providing a listing of grasses, legumes, and composites for a cosmopolitan meadow, with minimal maintenance, and introduces (to me, anyway) the notion of “brown” roofs. (He thinks the “green” ones will eventually turn into brown ones through neglect.)

This is a book for every urban naturalist. No, expand that: every urban resident.