ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL
Before the Industrial Revolution, London was awash with wildflowers. Jack Watkins traces their history and finds that, if given a chance, these opportunistic plants may still return
WILLIAM CURTIS’S Flora Londinensis, published in instalments between 1777 and 1798, was the first comprehensive book on the flora of the capital and its environs and one of the first to focus on plants in an urban area. Meticulous hand-coloured copperplate illustrations supported a text that described fritillary growing ‘in meadows between Mortlake and Kew’, chicory in Battersea Fields and a rare species of stonecrop on a chapel wall in Kentish Town.
Two centuries earlier, William Turner, ‘the father of British botany’, had noted carpets of bluebells, as well as great burnet and chamomile at Syon. And in his Herball of 1597, John Gerard wrote of clary growing wild around Gray’s Inn, Holborn, and pennyroyal on a common near Mile End.
London’s historic flora is unsurprising. Up until 1745, the fully built-up area only ran from around Westminster’s Horse Ferry crossing to Lambeth and Park Lane in the west and to Shoreditch and Mile End in the east. North of Oxford Street was mainly still fields and there wasn’t much more than a mile or so of development south of the Thames.
Even beyond that time, the city retained rural aspects. Kensington’s market gardens lingered into the 1800s and Notting Hill’s largest farms survived until the 1880s. Wood anemone and lesser celandine grew in Marylebone’s fields in the first decades of the 19th century. Traveller’s joy, or old-man’s beard, still draped the hedgerows of today’s fume-filled Edgware Road and the fragrance of lily-of-the-valley wafted across Hampstead Heath.
The rapid development of London from then, not to mention its suburban overspill in the early 20th century, meant that, by 1939, the soil in many parts of the city had not seen daylight for decades, with inevitable consequences. Yet a 1947–55 London Natural History Society study of the densely built-up Cripplegate area, just north of St Paul’s—which had
been flattened by wartime incendiaries— showed what opportunists plants are. By the end of the study period, sprouting up among the deserted ruins were 342 species of flowering plants and ferns, from dandelion and chickweed to spear thistle and perennial wall rocket. Rosebay willowherb took off here and in other bombed areas so prolifically that it became a symbol of Blitz-blighted districts, popularly known as bomb-weed.
Although you might think that London’s current flora has been pulverised by human requirements, it has retained a toehold and, in some areas, more than that. Even today, only one-third of Greater London is covered by buildings and tarmac, with another third semi-natural or mown grass, cultivated land or woodland and many of the city’s outer boroughs contain substantial tracts of woodland, heath and open down.
As part of its strategy to encourage more pollinating insects in recent years, the Royal Parks, which manages 5,000 acres of London’s green space, have introduced meadow-like strips to improve floral diversity. The gardens team at Kensington Palace has created a wildflower meadow that has seen the return of poppies, campion, daisies and ragged robin.
In outer London, the end of traditional management practices such as coppicing and pollarding, as well as the effects of trampling by locals for whom these places are recreational amenities, has meant many ancient woodlands have lost their once varied flora. But at Coldfall Wood in Muswell Hill, a reintroduction of rotational coppicing from the 1990s has encouraged the return of woodland species not seen in years, such as foxglove, St John’s wort and yellow pimpernel.
The past 40 years have also seen efforts to transform urban wastelands into new habitats for Nature. A temporary park created in 1977 on waste ground at Tower Bridge— the William Curtis Ecology Park, dedicated to the author of Flora Londinensis—was rapidly colonised by plants and became an inspiration for other urban Nature parks. Camley Street Nature Park, created out of a disused coal yard at King’s Cross, is now home to the snake’s-head fritillary, which once grew so profusely that it was sold in
‘Even today, only one-third of Greater London is covered by buildings and tarmac’
baskets at Covent Garden. Bird’s-foot trefoil, marsh marigolds, meadowsweet and purple loosestrife now inhabit the formerly heavily industrialised area that is the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park today.
Back on home ground, however, Londoners themselves continue to keep wildflowers at arm’s length. Gardens cover only under one-fifth of the land area and a 2015 London Assembly study reported that two-thirds of the capital’s front ones are now paved— a continuing trend. Yet opportunities to shift the balance back in favour of plants are still available. Although France has restricted use of glyphosate in private and public spaces, it’s still used by 98% of London’s councils to spray wildflowers, or weeds, sprouting up in parks, on verges and around street trees and lampposts. One council bucking the trend is Hammersmith & Fulham, which became the first London borough to ban glyphosate use in 2016. Lambeth is phasing out its use in 2021 and Hackney has gone pesticide-free in some areas, halved its use in others and removes weeds by hand in town centres.
Botanist and horticulturist Sophie Leguil has started a campaign, More Than Weeds (www.morethanweeds.co.uk), to encourage city dwellers to change the way they view urban plants. When the 2020 lockdown forced councils to temporarily abandon spraying, she photographed a poppy that had sprung up in a pavement crack in Kennington and rapeseed in Leicester Square, together with other species, such as shepherd’s purse, herb robert and viper’s bugloss.
She highlights initiatives in French and German cities that have shown it’s more than possible to find space for wildflowers in streets and even to sow native plants in pavements, walls, gutters and in tree pits. Selective weeding ensures that they do not become obstructive. ‘Rather than worrying about how untidy weeds look,’ she suggests, ‘perhaps we should start thinking about what they bring to our lives.’
‘It’s possible to find space for wildflowers in streets and even to sow them in walls and gutters’