The flora of today surely differs from that of five hundred or more years ago, due largely to the influence of an increasingly complicated civilization; may it not be of interest to record in detail the ruderals and escapes of to-day as a prophesy of the flora of the not distant future?
Edgar Anderson and Robert Woodson
The Species of Tradescantia, 1935
The urban environment has an ecology that is of the people, by the people and for the people. We humans welcome other organisms into the city to the extent that they contribute to making it a more beautiful, more livable, or more profitable place to be; and we vilify as weeds those organisms that flourish in the urban environment without our approval or assistance. It is these plants-the spontaneous vegetation of the urban environment-that are the subject of this website. Some of them are native to northeastern North America, but many have been introduced from other parts of the world, mainly Europe and Asia.
This website has two purposes: to help people identify the plants that are growing all around them, and to introduce the concept that many of these plants, despite being categorized as weeds, are actually performing important ecological functions in the urban ecosystem, such as water filtration, soil stabilization and pollution remediation.
Peter Del Tredici
Lecturer in Landscape Architecture
Harvard Graduate School of Design
