neW urBan environmenTs, C.1860–1950^173It is also important to emphasize the numerous wild plants which survived
the frenetic attentions of the gardener. Domestic gardens had for centuries
been developing a distinctive weed flora, and Tutin in the 1950s and 1960s
recorded 95 species over a period of – 25 years in a 0.5 hectare example in
Leicester.^62 These were in part the weeds of arable fields; in part the kinds
of plants, associated with regular disturbance of the ground, and which
had characterized the unmade roads and general disorder of pre-industrial
cities and towns; but they also included species like creeping cinquefoil or
shepherd’s purse, otherwise found in the different environments of grasslands
and hedgebanks. The reduced competition between adventitious weeds
resulting from regular weeding creates communities whose members share
only an ability to survive attempts at eradication: here, more than anywhere
else in towns and cities, plants grew in circumstances – of soil type, drainage,
shade – in which, in the countryside, they would have been out competed by
rivals, and in consequence plants like selfheal (Prunella vulgaris), characteristic
of grazed damp grassland, could be found growing beside woodland species
like wood avens (Geum urbanum), in assemblages which were ‘unnatural’,
but no more so than those associated with grazed downland or meadows.^63
Alien and indigenous plants also happily coexisted: in regularly mown lawns
grasses and low-growing plants like white clover (Trifolium repens) were
accompanied by alien invaders such as creeping speedwell (Veronica filiformis),
which was introduced into flower beds in the early nineteenth century but, for
reasons which remain unclear, suddenly developed in the inter-war years as
a ‘beautiful but rampant’ lawn weed.^64 Some garden habitats, however, more
directly mimicked those found in the wider landscape. Garden walls boasted
assemblages similar to those found on cliffs and rock faces, although as the
Latin name of ivy-leaved toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis) and the English name
of wallflower (Cheiranthus cheir) suggest, many had long made these artificial
habitats their principal homes.^65 Risbeth in 1948 recorded 186 species of
vascular plant and 32 bryophytes growing on walls in the town of Cambridge;
Payne noted 150 on urban walls in south-east Essex.^66
Gardens were, not surprisingly, home to a wide range of invertebrates.
Between 1926 and 1973, over 700 different species of insect were recorded
in a single suburban garden in Blackheath, London.^67 Robbins, describing
the wealth of Lepidoptera in one example near Victoria Park in London in
the 1880s, observed that ‘Evidently there is a garden fauna just as there is
a fauna of cultivated land’.^68 Moreover, as the new gardens matured their
hedges, shrubberies and trees – especially in the larger examples – provided
cover and nesting sites for a wide range of birds, typically the starling,
green finch, chaffinch, house-sparrow, great and blue tit, mistle thrush,
song thrush, blackbird, robin, hedge-sparrow, and wren. Most were the
commoner farmland birds, especially those which prefer some woodland,
scrub or hedgerows: true open-country birds like the lapwing or the skylark,
and even those that prefer moderately open conditions such as the tree pipit
and the stock dove, were not well adapted to this environment.^69 In the larger