About twenty years ago I first came across gardening magazine Gardens Illustrated. Not long after, it was part of a broad range of other British gardening mags I analysed in depth for my final thesis from university. I’ve been a loyal reader since. But one thing I still remember from those first editions I came across is a one page column about lesser known woody plants recommended to gardeners by one Roy Lancaster. At the time I had no outside growing space (and would not for another ten years), so it seems strange this in particular stuck in my mind.

It might have been the enthusiasm for each plant with which it was written, it might have been the excitement of learning about new plants. But there were so very many fabulous plants new to me. Looking back, I guess the decisive thing about this column was that its author was described as a "plant hunter” if I remember correctly. Until then I had believed the days of plant hunters were long over. Plants had been discovered, named and introduced from all parts of the world and that was that. Plant hunting as a career was extinct. Apparently not so. How incredibly exciting!

Since then, I’ve come across Roy Lancaster’s name many a time (despite never having watched the BBC’s Gardeners’ World or listened to Gardeners’ Question Time) and discovered just what a luminary he is in the world of horticulture. Two weeks ago – hot off the press – I finally got my hands on the book I’ve been looking forward to ever since first learning about it: Roy Lancaster’s autobiography, My life with plants.

It is, in one sentence, exactly what it says on the tin. But it is much more. Since Roy Lancaster over the course of his career has met so many, if not most, of its influential figures, this book is also a snapshot of the world of British horticulture during the past half century. Not a concise history of it, but a snapshot of important players and the network existing between them, as well as a wealth of information of how things were done. Historians will love it one day as it is such a rich source to mine.

Starting with his childhood, he devotes roughly a chapter each to the various stages in his career. From apprenticeship with the Parks Department in his native Bolton to National Service in Malaya; from studies at the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens to his eighteen years at the world famous Hillier nursery and arboretum; from first going freelance to getting involved with the BBC. Naturally, there are also chapters about his travels as a plant hunter and finally about the rare plants he grows in his own garden.

Truth be told, I would have loved more on the plant hunting! But he has covered much of that elsewhere, notably in his weighty tome Travels in China: A Plantsman’s Paradise and its companion A Plantsman in Nepal. One day, hopefully, I'll get around to finish reading those books... (They are still in the 1.50 metre tall stack of books next to my bed, it's just a matter of finding the time. :-) )

I was lucky enough to hear Roy Lancaster talk about his life a year ago at Kew. If I feel one tiny disappointment about the book, it’s that his lively voice and facial expressions, the beaming smile and twinkle in the eye, the sheer exuberance which captured his audience does not so readily translate onto the page. You can't blame the author for that though – a written account of course is a different thing to a live talk.

Still, Lancaster’s narrative style is much like that of a grandfather telling stories about his youth: full of detail which along the way enlightens about a society and way of life the younger generations never got to know for themselves. A grandfather whom you really enjoy listening to because his tales are studded with amusing anecdotes throughout. Many, of course, are plant related – but by no means all as when he talks about his early love of steam trains.

                             Anecdotes and listings of plants spotted all over the world

I loved being told, for instance, that as a boy he used to press plants between newspapers under the living room carpet (!). I too spent many hours pressing plants between blotting paper as a child. Unlike Roy Lancaster’s, however, they were not destined for something as educational as a herbarium: I would later assemble them into “pictures” on notecards which I’d then gift to family members as birthday or Christmas presents. Lancaster seems to have been far more serious-minded

Something that struck me as perhaps typically male is his seemingly life-long enthusiasm for using and making lists, finding and ticking off plants in the wild. A habit like trainspotting. Myself, I dearly love wild plants and will always keep an eye open and of course enjoy finding plants that are rare. But I would never dream of going somewhere with a local flora in hand, seeing whether I could find them all, too, or travel to a particular location to track down one specific species. But then I’m not a botanist.

And yes, you probably have to be a bit of a plant nut to fully enjoy the book, at least it helps. Still, even those who aren’t will find plenty of interest - and you could always skim the passages describing which plants Lancaster spied when and where. Anyway, what else would you expect from one of the most eminent plantspeople of our age?

                                Snippets of information galore: Alternative tobacco, anyone?

What really surprised me though was how committed and confident he must have been from early on in order to write letters and send specimens of plants he had collected to various experts and institutions. Whether corresponding with Kew as an apprentice or with the Singapore Botanical Gardens whilst being stationed on Malaya during his army years: I don’t think I would have had the courage to do so. Or indeed have thought of it and taken the initiative, especially at such a relatively young age.

Also, back with the book now, there is much that gardeners will recognize, usually hidden in mere asides. Like when he mentions feeding the nasty grubs of wine weevil to a friendly Robin and falling in love with the genus Primula. But with Lancaster, these observations of plants in the garden are then accompanied by memories of seeing them grow wild in their natural home by their thousands! There are nuggets, too, concerning other plant hunters - current and of days gone by. I never knew, for example, that Primula florindae with its sulphur-yellow drooping flowers was named after Frank Kingdon-Ward’s first wife – “blonde and long-legged Florinda”.

And anyone who’s ever attempted the same will readily understand his delight to see seed brought back from afar grow and get established, perhaps even flower, at home. Mine aren’t new or even rare finds, but that doesn’t mean they give me any less pleasure: the Kowhai (Sophora tetraptera) and Southern rata (Metrosideros umbellata) from New Zealand, the Swiss cheese plants (Monstera deliciosa) from fruit bought at a Madeira market (which eventually, due to their size, we had to give away), the Bomarea (caldasii, I believe) from a trackside near the El Altar mountains in Ecuador and others like them.

My own interest in plant hunting and faraway shores, by the way, was awakened by my favourite book – quoted in this blog before – about a naturalist and his ten year-old daughter’s travels to Madagascar. I first learned of Marco Polo from its pages and jungle descriptions and the little girl’s quest for a Madagascan orchid in particular fired my imagination. But growing up behind The Wall, for an East German there was next to no chance to travel abroad and so I just dreamed. The orchid mentioned in the book meanwhile must have been Angraecum sesquipedale, Darwin’s orchid: its flowers’ long spur led Darwin to surmise that a moth with a particularly long proboscis existed - which later was indeed found to be true.

To sum up then: Roy Lancaster’s autobiography is a fascinating read. Most people who are into plants will not only find much to learn but have memories of their own triggered. Having gone through a horticultural apprenticeship myself years ago, mine mainly bubbled up whilst reading the account of his early horticultural education. The mention of countless clay pots to be cleaned with cold water during his years at Bolton, for instance, had me shivering again as I remembered why to this day I have a hearty dislike for heathers. But that’s a story for some other blogpost perhaps…

Perhaps it was writing my previous post that gave the final push and incentive: I've finally read the book I had asked for last Christmas. Ecosystem Services Come To Town is not a brand-new title, it was published in 2012. I would never have stumbled across it, not least because of the strange title. Unless you are working in climate research, landscaping, urban planning and a few other such fields, I doubt you'd know what Ecosystem Services means. Or is this just me? Anyway. Last autumn I went to a brief seminar about the urban landscape of the future, which I found incredibly inspiring. One of the experts talking was Gary Grant. He is the author of this book about "Greening cities by working with nature", its subtitle.

Starting point and basic motivation for the book is the fact that already more than half of the world's population lives in cities: "We therefore need to consider how we can make life in those cities as efficient, comfortable and fulfilling as we can without continuing to rely on the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. It will not be straightforward and there will probably be no single solution, but the future will surely involve city greening. This book is intended to describe some of those difficulties and various ways that city greening can occur - not only for adornment and liveability, but also to make cities function in harmony with natural processes."

"Greening", in this context then, is much more than creating a few parks and adding some trees along the road or a few planters to a piazza. It is a far wider, more holistic approach. As Grant writes: "People are beginning to look differently at the way our towns and cities are designed, built and operated. This new approach goes beyond the necessary reduction in energy and water use and the mitigation of impacts on the wider environment. How mean-spirited it is to limit our ambitions to reducing negative environmental impacts!" In order to achieve this, he says later, "there must be a fundamental shift in the way we design and manage the built environment."

                          We are totally reliant on nature - even city dwellers

What is behind that - gradual and encouraged - shift? A growing body of evidence, of course. It's not just the moral but somewhat fluffy sense that nature should have a place, too, or that people prefer to live in nice, pretty environments. There are "proper, substantial reasons" even those only concerned with figures, economic data and the like will get. For their sake, perhaps, the horrible and abstract term "ecosystem services" has been coined. As Grant explains it: "There [now] is an acknowledgement that our society, our civilisation and our cities are reliant on the goods and services supplied free of charge by the natural world - so-called ecosystem-services." (And no, the term wasn't Grant's invention.)

These ecosystem-services, according to the book, can be classed in four groups: provisioning, cultural, regulating and supporting Ecosystem services. The most obvious perhaps, Provisioning, comprise fresh water, food, wood & fibre and fuel. Cultural services nature provides to us are those of an aesthetic, educational, recreational and spiritual kind. Among the regulating services are water purification (either through aquatic plants or geological layers), flood regulation (think river flood plains, the sponge effect vegetation has etc.), climate regulation and disease regulation.  Finally, primary production (including oxygen, I'd guess), soil formation and the nutrient cycle are grouped as supporting eco-system services.

Incidentally, the thought process behind this is mentioned in another - very different - book I've just read (and one I can highly recommend!): "A Brush with Nature - Reflections on the Natural World" is a collection of columns British nature writer Richard Mabey has written for BBC Wildlife magazine since 1984. One column from 2006, called "Nature: The New Prozac?", looks at the re-discovery of the health benefits of nature:

"There's been much discussion recently about encounters with nature being good for your health - physical and psychological. [...] But it's not new, really. The idea that you can be mended by the healing currents of the green outdoors, by engaging with rhythms and ways of life different from your own, goes back to classical times. [...] Now [though] there are statistics to back up this ancient common sense. [...] This is all exciting stuff, both for people and the natural world. It could lead to savings in health budgets and, reciprocally, to quantifiable economic value being put on natural habitats."

Today, open-source software such as i-Tree can calculate or quantify the economic value of even individual urban trees! (For those interested, click this for more about the i-Tree tools and projects, not just from London.) Mabey predicted the development, I guess. For although the i-Tree tools were first released in August 2006, initially this happened in and for the US. Only later were they adapted by interested practitioners, scientists and non-profit organisations around the world to their local conditions and requirements. I doubt Richard Mabey was aware of them when writing his column.

If all this sounds too abstract, lets look at more concrete examples: Cities usually are by some degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. All the concrete and stone creates so-called heat islands, as is the relative lack of shade and lack of cooling from evaporation.  The sun's radiation is stored as heat in the materials our conventional buildings and streets are made of and emitted again at night, preventing the area from cooling down as much as non-built up tracts. That's the reasons why even when there's snow outside of London, even when it snows in London, it hardly ever settles on the ground. And it also is why everyone tries to flee cities in a really hot summer...

By introducing more plants - via street trees or as more parks, green roofs, green walls  - you reduce this "heating up". Air quality will improve. Plants can even reduce the level of noise city dwellers are constantly subjected to. And soil and plants will also mop up excessive rainwater - helping prevent flash floods. All "proper quantifiable benefits": people in offices that don't overheat so much are less likely to be "off sick" and probably more efficient at that. Insurance costs for flood damages - think overflowing drains after a downpour, for instance, or flooded  subways - are down, costs for air conditioning needed, too. For the number crunchers, you do not even have to point to the cultural services...

Unmistakably a reference book, Ecosystem Services Come To Town is strongly structured: ten main chapters are each divided into many subchapters - or perhaps "headlines for paragraphs", as you often find two of these "subchapters" to a page. In the introduction he sets out store: starting from a modern disconnect between nature and many city dwellers, the spike in urban populations and the human population in general he moves on to the limits to growth, global threats and why a good stewardship of nature (and ecosystem services with it) is vital. Greening cities, Grant says, is an essential and increasingly inevitable part of this.

The main body is divided into the following chapters: Origins of Cities (going right back to the emergence of humans), Modern Cities, Issues facing contemporary cities, Working with nature, Urban nature, Water and Cities, City-wide Greening (concerned with regional efforts like water catchment management or regional networks of linked spaces where wildlife and plants can thrive, such as green belts) and finally Greening Neighbourhoods and Buildings: green roofs and rooftop gardens, green walls or vertical gardens, so-called pocket parks etc..

In addition to the usual index plus "notes and references", there are two extensive appendices to the book. One presents over a dozen innovative projects which have won awards at the Integrated Habitats Design Competition. The latter is a contest instigated in 2009 by the author and two other experts. The second appendix is a well-structured list of resources, briefly explaining and providing the web link to a great number of institutions, concepts and documents encountered in the book.

So - what is the way forward then? What should the cities of the future look like? And, just as important, how can we actually get there (and I'm not thinking of means of transport, although these of course are part of the vision)? Grant feels sure that:

"Towns and cities do not need to be barren, hot and dry, they can be green and pleasant, with created habitats providing ecosystem services on and around buildings where people live and work. This means that landscapes on or around buildings and infrastructure can be more than an optional ornamental extra but a multi-functional layer of soil and vegetation  that controls surface water, provides food and wildlife habitats and keeps us cool, fit and sane.  To make this transformation from grey to green will require panoramic, trans-disciplinary thinking and coordinated action. We will need to move away from our over-specialisation and the widespread and common feeling that dealing with the conservation of nature is either irrelevant or in some cases, nice, but 'someone else's department'."

He finishes his book with the following conviction: "There will be a new direction for architecture that will stimulate further innovation. This will be accelerated by new ways of collaborating and thinking, but we do not need to wait for such changes in order to begin the green transformation of our cities". A heartening call to arms or, to remain civilian, to action!

              A great book to start you on the subject of greening cities for the future

My own conclusion? While Ecosystem Services Come To Town is a reference book, it is easy to read and - in my opinion - contains very little professional jargon, making it easy to understand for people with an interest but not much in the way of knowledge on the subject. Since so often talk of the future is framed in scenarios of gloom and doom - climate change, pollution, scarcity of resources, dwindling number of species - I especially like the author's positive attitude: "The intention is to be brief, informative, inspirational and practical. And optimistic - there is no benefit in being anything else." It is, in short, a very good introduction to a topic which will become ever more important and (hopefully) mainstream rather than a niche issue. And it is detailed enough to cater for a far wider audience than the interested layperson!

Oh, and since I've used the term in the headline but not in the post itself, I probably ought to explain "Green infrastructure".  I can't do it better than Wikipedia though, so in case you are still unsure I'll simply refer you to there.