Naturalist Amanda Tuke has spent years hunting out wildlife and wild plants in the UK’s cities. She talks to Daniel Neilson about her book, Wild Pavements, and why the cracks in the pavement are worth a second look.
Tell us a little about the genesis of the book. How and why did it come about?
There were two strands: my interest in urban nature and urban ecology, and my desire to start nature writing. I did a PhD in plant ecology on the islands of St Kilda, off the Outer Hebrides. When I came back to my home, I'd look at the plants growing in my area of London and barely recognise any of them. Then two decades later I took a course in nature writing at Bath Spa University that the wonderful bird writer Stephen Moss led, and which I now teach. I absolutely loved it.
At the time, during Covid, we were very much confined to our area, so I thought, now is the time to start looking at all of the birds and the plants around me in South London and to write about them. Then those two things came together, and I just had the most fun time for a couple of years exploring different cities. This led to writing the book.
Give us the premise of the book, since you focus on different species and different areas of the country.
The premise was that you can go anywhere in an urban area and come across interesting wildlife and wild plants. My argument is that anyone can open their door; you don't have to go somewhere else to find nature, interact with it and connect with it. It is literally outside your front door.
In London, I'd start at St Paul's Cathedral and walk in all directions of the compass, being drawn into different areas depending on what looked interesting when I looked down side streets, or if I could hear birds singing.
As well as your walks in London, you also explored urban nature in cities like Newcastle, Liverpool and Cardiff. How do you know what looks interesting?
Urban botanists absolutely love messy patches; that's where you find the most interesting things. The plants are incredibly tenacious, and their spores and seeds are raining down on our pavements all the time, and some of them can get a root hold.
They tend to be plants well adapted to, for example, dry limestone or volcanic slopes, so they find something in our cities that's an analogue of that — in the same way that peregrine falcons find analogues of cliffs on tower block roof ledges. That's all nature is doing. It's not making a judgment; it doesn't care what it looks like; it just needs enough to survive. That's what's so fascinating to an ecologist.
How do you get people to start looking at urban nature?
When I take people out, we'll often look at just a single road, and find plants from all over the world — from Africa, from South America, or from Southeast Asia — living alongside each other. I always say to people, start really small. Learn what the plants are on your garden path, look at pavement plants in your street. I believe it's really important for humans to know the names of things and their stories. For example, there’s a common pavement plant called Oxford ragwort, which was introduced from the slopes of Mount Etna and now grows all over the UK. It was brought to England by a plant collector in the 1700s and planted in the Oxford Botanic Garden. It then spent a hundred years crawling along the walls of Oxford, getting to the rail station, and then it has now spread throughout the rail network and into city centres. Next time you're at a train station, if there's a sort of yellow ragwort-looking thing growing alongside the railway, that will most likely be Oxford ragwort.
How do you inspire young people to engage with nature?
There's a huge surge in interest in birdwatching among Gen Z at the moment, and I think AI has something to do with that too — the Merlin app has given people access to identifying birdsong. I often use plant ID apps for street trees and escaped garden plants, too. Nature knowledge is so much more accessible nowadays.
In the context of urban nature, what are the key problems, and what can the average person do about it?
What I've used the book to do is point out that all the big conservation questions play out in cities — everything from how you create a meadow to the effects of using herbicides to the impact of climate change to water pollution. For many people, the idea of making big, nationwide changes is just too hard to think about, whereas protecting that bit of verge along your own road feels far more manageable.
Part of my secret agenda is to get everybody interested in botany, simply because plants are the foundation of all terrestrial ecosystems. It seems bizarre to me that most people see plants as just a green smudge or only value garden plants. I really want to get people excited about our amazing wild plants. Once you've started noticing them, it's very hard to stop looking. It becomes an obsession.
Amanda’s book Wild Pavements: Exploring Britain’s Cities with an Urban Naturalist is available now on Flint Books.
Photo credit: Electric Egg Ltd / Jennifer de Montfort / Erni / LouiseRosePhotography / Adobe Stock
