An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Trees, and Herbs in Your Path
Get to know your leafy neighbors
Imagine going for a walk with a knowledgeable friend who points out all the plants you see and the coolest facts about them. This practical field guide is that friend, providing a delightful introduction to 58 of the plants, trees, weeds, and herbs you’ll encounter walking around most US cities.
Accurate, charming line drawings accompany detailed yet accessible botanical information about each plant that helps you easily identify it in all seasons. You’ll also learn each plant’s backstory, including its relatives, origins, historical uses, and other fun facts. Getting to know the plants you meet every day will help you strengthen your sense of place, improve your foraging game, make new botanical and herbal friends, and marvel at the life that is all around us.
Read on for an excerpt of An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Trees, and Herbs in Your Path by Maggie Herskovits, available for preorder from our site or your local bookseller!
I got to know many of the plants in this book intimately during my time spent as a gardener in a New York City park. I first learned their names and how to identify them in order to rip them from the soil. In our clean garden plan, they were considered invaders. We used to joke as gardeners that weeds were our job security, for as long as there were weeds we had a job to do. And there were always weeds.
And then one day, two years in, I saw things differently. What I saw was a lone lambsquarter growing discreetly within a patch of Persicaria virginiana. A seed had taken advantage of a small opening that allowed just enough light to sprout. The plant then took on a very slender form to fit in this hiding place and stopped growing just when it reached the height of the surrounding Persicaria. Genius. Buds were bulging, ready to blossom, aliveness was gushing. You could not see it from the edge of the garden bed, and so it was not interrupting the integrity of the planting plan. My first act of rebellion was to let it live.
Up until that moment I prided myself in being able to find the most hidden weeds, remove the subversive beings and keep the garden clean. From that day forward, I joined in on their subversion. I still found them alright and when I did, I knelt close and marveled at just how cunning these plants were.
This gardener’s existential crisis brought me to know these plants beyond the label of weed. I got to know them for who they are, up close and personal. They learned about me, and we shared lessons and stories of life. Come take a walk with me on the pathway to relationship with spontaneous urban plants. You know, the plants on the block that seem to come from nowhere and grow from thin air. But everything is connected and nothing comes from nothing. Seeds are spread by birds, wind, and you. They land in cracks of concrete, vacant lots, and other city habitats. The newly sprouted plants grow to form seeds of their own and thus continue the cycle.
This field guide is filled with stories of plants that inhabit the cities of North America (Turtle Island). Some were present pre-colonization, some were introduced intentionally, and still others traveled here using us humans and other animals as unwitting carriers—mixed into boat ballast, hidden in bags of grain, tucked into packing materials, or stuck in cow hooves, just a few examples of the endless possibilities of plant travel.
No matter how or when they got to this land, the plants that thrive in the city do so because of their tolerance to all of the challenging factors that make up the urban environment. Even though the city is a relatively new place here on Earth, and no plant grew up or evolved here, the adaptations plants developed to survive are well suited to the urban environment. The plants that grace our urban home developed their survival traits over countless generations to become a perfect fit for the place where they were born. Plants that thrive in the urban environment have evolved in places of Mother Earth’s constant shifts and edges. As Richard Mabey writes:
“A good proportion . . . made a life in the planet’s most restless places. They’d evolved on tide pounded beaches and the precarious slopes of volcanoes, in the flood zones at the edges of rivers and the muddy wallows made by wild grazing animals, in scree and shingle and glacial moraines.”
They do well here because the urban ecosystem is also a restless place, a fact illuminated in its Latinate name: ruderal ecosystem. Ruderal comes from the Latin word rudus, meaning “rubble.” Here in the rubble lives are lived—plants, insects, birds, raccoons, squirrels, dogs, and more—all interacting with each other and the environment, an active ecosystem. That’s right, city plants and animals (yes, that includes us humans) are among the living organisms that interact within the ruderal ecosystem. For the most part, the urban ecosystem is human-made and human-run, but our structures still exist upon and within the complex systems of Mother Earth. Our cities are subject to her weather as well as her rare, yet formidable, natural disasters, but the everyday actions of humans create the conditions that form the environment of the urban ecosystem.
In ecosystems governed by Mother Earth, there is a process called ecological succession, the process by which natural communities replace, or succeed, each other over time. The last stage of succession, a climax community, is a high biomass, high complexity ecosystem like a mature forest. This stage remains until a disturbance (fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, lava flow, etc.) renews the process by erasing what is there, leaving a blank slate for something new to start. Like the change of seasons, ecological succession moves through this cycle in a circular fashion, over time, again and again.
The depleted land created by the disturbance is then colonized by plants known as pioneer species. They have adapted to be quick to sprout, quick to grow, and quick to set seed. Some annual plants, like green foxtail and chickweed, can have up to five generations in one growing season! Pioneer species generally love full sun and tolerate a range of challenging growing conditions: heat, drought, compaction, low-nutrient soil, air pollution, salt, and a wide range of soil pH. The pioneer species slowly attract wildlife and make the land more habitable for the larger, more specialized plants that will eventually shade them out, creating a new ecosystem and continuing the slow march toward the climax community.
In the urban ecosystem, the process of Mother Earth’s ecological succession is thwarted by humans. The constant construction, concrete, and change keeps the urban ecosystem in a sort of arrested development, suppressed by its defining feature: disturbance. City land resembles the native habitats of the plants known as pioneer species in that it shares the challenging growing conditions that other plants cannot tolerate. So it is the pioneer species that greet us every spring in the oft-disturbed urban home we share. With little competition from larger plants that may succeed them, their place each year is guaranteed.
As of this writing, more than 80 percent of Americans live in cities, and according to the U.N., 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. The urban ecosystem is growing rapidly at the expense of other ecosystems whose communities are being disrupted. While we grieve the loss of landscapes and species, we can find hope in these city plants. They provide needed diversity as a source of food and shelter for bees, birds, and butterflies. And, just as important, they provide medicine for our souls as a source of contact to the natural world when it may seem like nature is far, far away.
In the pages to come, each plant profile includes key features that will help you identify the plant in the field. Also included is information on
- geography
- historical uses
- fun facts
The plants are listed alphabetically by common name. Entries include the plants’ botanical Latin names. Common names are made by the people in the language of the people, so you may know plants by different names. All the better!
This book is not a guidebook for foraging nor is it an herbal medicine guide. Please consult professional foragers and herbalists (there are many!) if you are interested in having a deeper relationship with the plants outlined in this book. Please do not harvest any plant unless you are 100 percent certain of its identity. This book is simply the meet and greet.
If you are ready to harvest after reading this book, here are some tips on foraging:
- Always ask first.
- Take no more than 10 percent.
- Take only what you need.
- Make sure no chemicals have been sprayed. If lambsquarter or dandelion are present, it could be a sign of safety (they are very susceptible to herbicides).
- A general rule is to harvest at least twenty feet away from a busy roadway to avoid contaminants.
- Be wary of compounds in the soil. Plants can take up toxins in their leaves and then pass those on to you.
This book helps us connect to our urban place, name the plants, recognize their survival skills, and admire their brilliance. When we learn the names of beings, we begin to show them love. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it. Words and names are the ways we humans build relationship, not only with each other, but also with plants.” Erich Fromm helps to close the circle, connecting naming, respect, and love. He writes, “The active character of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.” When we are surrounded by beings we love, this experience brings us to love our place, the land, and gives us the capacity and desire to treat our home with care. And finally, to know the plants in your path is to forget loneliness. Present at just about every time of the year, they are friends to sit with and share quiet existence.
Want to keep reading? Check out An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Trees, and Herbs in Your Path by Maggie Herskovits, now available to preorder from our site or at an independent bookstore near you.